How to animate a blur effect up until a certain intensity?

Question

I'm trying to animate a blur effect up until a certain intensity. Doing so using the .animate method of UIView is trivial:

 let visualEffectView = UIVisualEffectView(effect: nil)

 UIView.animate(withDuration: 1) {
     visualEffectView.effect = UIBlurEffect(style: .regular)
 } 

, the issue here is that the final blur intensity is way too high to my needs. Does anyone know if there is another way to achieve a similar result, reducing the final blur intensity?

Some approaches i can think of:

• animating the alpha property, but apparently Apple advices against it;
• using UIViewPropertyAnimator and stopping the animation midway, but i've tried to search for a way to achieve this without success. The best thing i can think of is to start it and then pause it halfway its duration by using a timer, but it looks like a very bad practice to me.