I think that it is a welcome unintended feature, even though its a little quirky.

I don't have a problem with checking other players' resources, I was just wondering if there were other benefits or costs. The freeze takes about 20-30 seconds, and whenever an auction starts in a video, I immediately skip forward by 20 seconds. Auctions are pretty boring to watch.

If auctions were unpaused, there would be pressure for anyone who wanted to win it to resolve it quickly. This creates significant time pressure to win auctions quickly and think maybe a little too fast. Paused auctions are the opposite; players who want to win auctions delay bids until the last second, in order to deter spite bids from jacking the price up, by pretending that their own bids are spite bids.

Agreed, the thing I like about the pause is there is time to check details that you would be too busy to check most of the time but you also need to make sure noone gets an auction for 8k because nobody was paying attention, an interesting split of your focus. It also causes tension when you're buying someone out or there is a stock race whilst you all pause for some arbitrary patent to be sold off.

Look at their resource value. Buy some carbon. Do they have more resource value now? It's because they own carbon.