How to stop time or pause the game in Factorio
Solution 1:
Pressing Shift-Space will pause the game (and display a grid of the world tiles; you can turn that off in the interface settings) without closing whatever windows you have open like Esc does.
It also freezes the UI, so unfortunately you can't access the tooltips, but it will at least let you scan the icons in peace.
Also, Settings → Interface → UI Scale can make the icons bigger, if that would help.