You can turn the animation off - but, when you do, there's still a ~2s pause when the workspace you switch to is dimmed and unresponsive so it feels just as janky.
There's simply no way to quickly flick from one space to another and then back again, which is something that could be done more or less instantly on Linux desktops back in the late 90s!
You can't turn the animation off, you can change it to be a fade animation instead of a slide animation. As you say, it takes the same time regardless.
There's simply no way to quickly flick from one space to another and then back again, which is something that could be done more or less instantly on Linux desktops back in the late 90s!