Hi Wolf! From the sounds of it, it's a side-effect of how the game was designed very early on. Basically at real time we can only really control the longer responses from skipping. If the time to respond was really short to begin with (If I remember it's about <20-30 seconds) , that means the scene has priority and will advance even if you close the game or pause it. We try our best to hint that some stuff like that may be coming up but unfortunately there's nothing we can do to make the timer pause button override this priority advance without rewriting a significant portion of the game code.
Thanks for your feedback in any case! 👏