I figured it was a conscious choice, but it makes the balance of interactivity severely imbalanced towards "take." The only interactivity I had experienced at all in the game up to the point where I had to stop for my own sanity was to slowly explore environments and find the button prompt. As I implied, if we'd just be able to look or walk around during these dialogues, the problem would be alleviated quite a bit - we're never locked to a view worth staring at. Another solution would be to give each dialogue a mandatory ~3 seconds, and after that give the user an option to press forward. 10+ seconds for how short these lines tend to be is, frankly, astounding.
Another cool addition would be to make sure each dialogue line is preceded by the name of the person speaking, or giving each person specific colors for their text. Sometimes when you press E on Clara, she is the one to start talking, other times it's you, so it sometimes takes a while to figure out who is saying what. If this is meant to evoke/expand upon some kind of "blurry separations between people/viewpoints" theme, it's not quite salient yet.
I'm not trying to be mean, I was really excited for this game when I heard about it, but I only have so much time to literally stare at wall textures before I need the game to move on.