Given that they wanted it to be an always available travel system, they didn't really need to try to legitimise it in world with a visual system, immersion-breaking or otherwise. They could, very simply, have left it at "When you approach certain areas, they are marked as locations of note. Later, you can open your map and select them, and your party will travel there from wherever they are." If they gave no "in universe" explanation at all, people would likely just assume expedited foot travel that the player view skips over for the sake of ease, and there would be no complaints of lore-breaking. Sometimes less is legitimately more. (They could still have had Gale emerging from a portal and needing a hand, if that's important to the game story elements, it didn't need to interact with the swift travel system)
