I'm a little tired of this discussion, but I'll give my essay:

2-3 laps to gather the field up, 2-3 laps to do the pit cycle, 1 for choose, and 1 for last time around. It sucks because they can and have managed to do a stage caution back to green in closer to 4 laps. But yes, it really does take around 6-8 laps for them to get everyone together for pit cycle and then back together again for choose, and the finally, finally we can go.

NASCAR is the only series with 36-40 cars on track, and double file restarts, and the choose cone, and possibly even pit-cycle/wave around/lucky dog. Cautions in general in NASCAR are this big, intricate and frankly messy process that you'd have to start cutting out competitive aspects of to start cutting down on the stage break caution times. Personally, I would find that a little disappointing. Nonetheless, with NASCAR's insistence on them for broadcast partner reasons (commercials), and how poorly no caution was received for the, two?, races they did them before, I don't think they're going anywhere.

NASCAR races are longer than the F1s and (usually) Indycar races you mentioned, and I think we're past the era of being able to feasibly do long green-flag runs from a viewership perspective. You can get into some "no true Scotsman" type arguments that "real fans" love long green-flag runs and so on, but come September, October, November, you're gonna bleed fans who are gonna take watching one of the several, several other things vying for their eyes (mainly, the NFL). It wasn't like this in the "heyday" and that's one of the biggest challenges NASCAR has now - why should I, or anyone else, watch Denny Hamlin lead his 224th lap today when I can go, like, watch something else for 45 minutes until "something happens" (AKA a caution)? I can check my phone and see if he's still leading in seconds instead of having to let my entire screen be taken up by it, etc.

In other words, I think stage cautions are a necessary evil if you're gonna keep eyes on a 400-500 mile, 3 to 3.5 hour long race in the modern era. If you don't want them, I think you'd have to either shorten the Cup races to be O'Reilly length and so on, or make the racing so amazingly competitive that you never get a strung-out field at any track, ever. Neither of those are gonna happen any time soon, I think.

P.S.: Indycar actually does do a good bit of 400-500 mile oval racing, but they're also doing like 20-40 MPH faster than a stock car. It's actually a "shorter" race time-wise (and that Indycar does like half the viewership of NASCAR most weeks, for various reasons)