There is a bit of Bay, styling in the transformations. mostly because they don't completely disregard gravity, Say what you will about ROTF's contribution to the Transformers universe, but the really did add a sense of scale and weight to Devestator's transformation, I really enjoyed many of the transformations in the Bay films to be honest.

In the cartoon combiners have always been the worst offenders of the laws of physics, typically fused together by arcing energy in their own mysterious Voltronesque stasis field. Even in the animated movie when Devestator combines Hook defies the law of gravity and floats into place suspended by magical elf wire.