No. You'll notice that your browser doesn't sequentially wait for each character to show up on the screen before rendering the next character.

The obvious thing to have done would be to have a single progress bar for all decompression operations requested in a single UI action. Darwin has had a process scheduler for some time now; they can be expected to make good use of it.

It is infuriating to be waiting for animations to end for literally 12 seconds.

Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with the original and inaccurate idea that Archive Utility waits around doing nothing on purpose to give you the impression it's doing something while it's doing nothing. It just means AU is implemented in a way that is slow and inefficient. Which is what I said so hey, we agree!