I am not talking about usability or accessibility but rather just a nice feeling of using the UI. Of course that is subjective but if I click and it appears as close to zero time perception then to me that is much better than lag and/or animation.
That would indeed be pointless because I was originally replying to a single UI interaction, where it doesn't really make a huge impact whether it happened in 2 or 5 frames.
You're trying to bring in continuous changing of frames here which is obviously perceived differently.