I'm in a similar boat. I've seen some other people complain about this too. The console will show 2000ms load times for pages, but it will only show the loading page for that route for a split second or not at all. If it shows the loading screen immediately, that'd make sense to me because my requests take time. But this is something happening both on dev and production for me.

yeah, it's pretty annoying

Why not use Link?

If you’re pages are server side generated then on dev it will be somewhat slowish if pinging live data

And if you’re not statically rendering it will be slower