There are good PDF viewers (e.g. MuPDF), where you need only a minimum of movements for going to a page, e.g. pressing "719g" in order to go to page 719.
Even when a PDF file does not have bookmarks and even when I do not remember the exact page where something is located, I can still know for instance that what I am looking for is about 20% before the end of the book, so if the book has 1400 pages I go quickly to page 1120 and I search around.
With a good PDF viewer I can navigate through a book much faster than I can turn the pages in a physical book.
Nevertheless, one needs to have a big high-resolution monitor in order to come close to the quality of a printed book. The current 4k monitors are a huge progress over the older 1080p or 1440p monitors, but their resolution is still insufficient to match that required to render correctly some of the typefaces that were popular for high-quality printing (but which have been rarely used after the transition to digital typefaces, being replaced by others more tolerant to low-resolution rendering).
Because I read a lot of books, there are almost 10 years since I have last used a display with a resolution less than 4k and I have always used them only at their native resolution. I cannot understand why some people choose to use various scaling methods to make the text big enough (but ugly), instead of doing the right thing, i.e. the rendering of all typefaces at the maximum available resolution, but choosing their dimension in points big enough for comfortable reading (after setting the monitor dots-per-inch value to the true value for the connected monitor).