Area transitions take a long time. They don't have to. Connected areas can be loaded in the background in case they're needed. Also, some paths are aggravatingly long. For instance,
- Path from the pirate merchant to Katja's Homestead
- Junkyard to electronics/medical
- Coretech/JKK to player house
- Foundry rift path to all the merchants (animal part merchant, then 2 junk merchants, then walking all the way to Kevin's)
- And extremely triggering Core City merchant level elevator and the electronics merchant not being the same area, despite being very small individually
It might seem small but it's normal to take the path dozens of times, especially on Dom where every items must be sold to maintain a positive flow of cash.