Seems to me that all this is stemming from the fact that you want to link world-time with time in ParaView. As @Kenneth_Moreland mentioned, ParaVIew is not a video application. It’s not meant for editing videos. Thus, an expectation that time in the application is same as what the user-perceives in real world is not reasonable. In fact, I’d argue that we get rid of real-time mode entirely. It was only added as a toy since it was technically possible. In hindsight, it should have never been there since that is probably genesis of this expectation that the time in ParaView has anything to do with world-time.
ParaView is intended for data processing. Processing involves adding filters. Thus each timestep, typically, lots of processing may happen. Any expectation that this processing is at interactive framerates is only true for tiny datasets and simple analysis pipelines. That being the case, hitting play is never expected to be like hitting play in a video player. Hitting play is simply expected to advance through time in the application with no relation to world-time (perceived by the user).