> pause growth and then resume it

Which shouldn’t feel so alien to us because human childhoods are a period of much slower growth than you see in other animals. Not a pause but still. IIRC it’s speculated that slowed growth is to give time for the brain to mature and to learn but either way it’s interesting to think about. If we grew the way dogs and cows to we’d be fully grown by around 10 years old.

You are right, and I am hard pressed to think of anything scarier than a pack 10 year olds with the strength of a man. Society may have taken an interesting direction.