All those pauses and waits are an artifact of later computerized/digital technology.
IIRC, it wasn’t uncommon for UHF dials to be continuous while VHF had precise stops and switched directly from channel to channel, so in UHF, as a practical matter, you'd have static between tuned channels, while that was not the case in VHF.
Its been a long time since I had a TV work a tuning dial, but that's what I recall.
That must have been a pretty old or cheap TV. All the dial TVs I ever used had stops for all the channels, VHF and UHF. And even when I was a kid, pretty much all TVs didn't have dials, but some kind of digitally-controlled analog tuner.
I remember tuning from channel 2 to 60 or so in maybe about a quarter second or less. Definitely so fast I didn't really register it as a delay.
Well, they weren't all old when I used them (some were; TVs were expensive to replace so got kept a while.) Maybe the ones without UHF stops were, though, its been quite a while.
> And even when I was a kid, pretty much all TVs didn't have dials
Likely, you were a kid more recently than I was.
I know, though, that I had to adjust the antenna for some channels. The knob did have specific stops, but you had to tinker with the antenna position for some channels.