Not that I know of. You can throw in a mix node at the end and animate the mix factor to make it a little easier. Disconnecting from the world output node doesn’t sound that horrible though, I do it all the time.
The whole node tree allows the HDRI to work but not display…ie: turns it off for screen or renders.
Try it and see…
BTW it’s not Yellow…it is Black… Look at the 3d view…
I meant the RGB Curves socket color is yellow. Hooked up to a shaders green input. Which technically is incompatible, although Blender itself may hook up an emission shader inside the mix shader when it realizes it’s being fed incomplete data.