It seems as if live verification has reached the point at which Recovery is a fallback for when you can't boot into your regular volume rather than a day to day tool, unlike in the good old days when you had to boot into an external volume to run Disk Repair â“,
Just like
in the good old days[/] you still cannot make repairs the boot drive and must boot into a different volume such as the Recovery Drive. (I don't believe you can make repairs to a different APFS volume on the same disk/partition either.)
The Recovery Drive is still a valuable tool for making repairs to a boot volume as well as offering several [I]Recovery options. Booting into the Recovery Drive (Command+R) on my MBP takes less time than booting normally. The only time it takes a good while is booting from the Internet Recovery Drive (Option+Command+R)
show DU's reactions to my hitting "First Aid" with the boot volume (HD) and with the High Sierra volume (HDw) on my APFS formatted drive selected, so Apple is apparently telling us that there's no need to boot into Recovery to repair
any disk (on an APFS formatted drive, anyhow) under ordinary circumstances. (I think the bottom image is pertinent.)
Recovery is, indeed, useful for its recovery options and if you can't boot into a regular volume, but it doesn't appear to be necessary for disk repair if you can boot your APFS formatted Mac normally. (HFS+ formatted Macs may be a different issue.)
Can you direct us to contradictory documentation?
I just tried a few command-R restarts on my Mid 2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro/2.8 GHz/16 GB RAM/macOs 10.14.5, and they averaged out at about 55 seconds to desktop, whereas a few restarts into my boot volume averaged out at about 20 seconds to desktop.
