Take away their token movement ability.
This may be too extreme for your group, but under the character token settings, you can control who can move the token. If only you can move it at their request, this particular problem is solved. It may create others, though. Switching back and forth can be tedious as well.
Dynamic Lighting includes movement restrictions.
If you have a paid subscription, you can use dynamic lighting settings to restrict movement, and only allow the player's view to update when they drop the token. Wall off areas you don't want explored, such as behind a door, with a small piece of wall on the lighting map, that you can move when the door is opened.
Make your descriptions short.
Give a one-sentence overview of the room, and then add details when players are exploring. This may make the exploration phase more interesting, as specific players get their turns uncovering your cool details.
Keep them in turn order, perhaps by marching order.
Just stay in play-by-turn during exploration, and ask players what they are doing in order; ignore any moves on the map that are out-of-turn.
Let them run into traps and fights.
You can just continue as you have been, and let the careless players run into trouble. You can get back to the description after the chaos of the fight is over, or if they are just running on to the next fight, they may miss a lot of loot and clues.
I hope some mix of these suggestions can answer your problem.
So I have not used Roll20 in a couple of years (or play D&D over those years unfortunately), but here is what I used to do for my players in situations where they were in the dark without a light (or otherwise had very low visibility). I would turn on Dynamic Lighting but turn off Global Illumination. Then for each of their tokens I would go to the advanced setting, make them emit light out to 5 ft and unselect All Players See Light. That way each player could see what was right next to them but would not see the other players if they were far apart. I also asked my players to not move too quickly (especially outside of combat when they are not taking turns) and they were pretty good at stopping or asking questions when they butted up against something or someone. Also you might try to incentives them asking questions in ways that do not reveal information to other players. "What am I seeing next to me?" instead of "IS THIS HIDEOUS CREATURE HOSTILE!?". In 5E they have ways to reward players for role playing well which could be adapted for this.
The disadvantage of this approach in your case is that if you only want small sections of the map not visible you will have to create a grid of light sources across the map and then turn off the ones where the Obscuring Mist should be.
That is what I have done in the past. Looking at the current offerings I think Advanced Fog of War is what you want. First of all, you can set the sight for each token (under the token's advanced settings):
tokens that emit light, or have a set view distance, clear fog dynamically as they're moved across the Page.
And they can only see what is in view for their token:
The fog cells that a token has revealed is saved for each token on a Page, so each player potentially can have a unique view of the same Page they are all currently exploring.
My suggestion would be to turn on advanced fog of war, set each token's sight to 5ft or however far you think they should be able to discern, use the Reveal Areas tool to reveal the whole map, and then use Hide Areas when something like Obscuring Mist is cast:
If you choose to reset the fog or manually hide areas, the areas
within the Token's set sight or vision range can not be hidden from
view.
Lastly, if the players need more than what they can see from the map when they uncover an area, I would "whisper" to that player. To help me be able to whisper fast enough I type up (in a text editor or word processor) whispers for things I know I want to share at some point. Then I can cut and paste them to the appropriate players. Of course the players are always going to ask about something that I have not prepared before hand, but hopefully these are not too frequent and all the players are patient while I type the answers to these questions.
Best Answer
They are different services which are intended to do different things.
I've been using D&D Beyond for a couple of years, as both player and DM. I've been using roll20 for a couple of weeks. I own many books offered through D&D Beyond, but not on roll20. So I can't offer direct feedback on every feature roll20 offers in this area, but the reasons I decided against buying content there were based on the paid features roll20 offers (as I understand them from how roll20 advertises them).
Your questions:
There aren't necessarily tradeoffs, per se. Each offers what it offers, which may or may not suit your needs-- you'll never miss a feature of one service or the other that's not relevant to you.
D&D Beyond offers helpful features such as digital versions of all D&D books (which you can share with your players in various ways, with a relevant subscription), options for creating and organizing campaigns (and allowing or disallowing specific content within them), an encounter builder, step-by-step character builders, style-consistent templates for homebrewed monsters, characters, magic items, and more, all of which can be directly inserted into your games, and a variety of organizational features that help DMs and players get a handle on the large amount of information available in the books. D&D Beyond can also integrate playtest content, referred to as Unearthed Arcana, into your games. D&D Beyond has a comprehensive set of information about the game available, and offers tools for organizing that information in various ways.
Roll20 has some of the D&D books available, but not all of them. The content which is available can be deployed directly into games in various ways, including references (such as rules, stat blocks, artwork for character tokens or maps, and so on), drag-and-drop characters and monsters onto maps, and even create on-demand reference cards directly from the roll20 compendium. The content can be shared with players, allowing them to look up rules, spell descriptions, lore, and so on. Your ability to share information on roll20 is also dependent on subscription, similar to D&D Beyond.
Purchasing D&D content on roll20 offers a faster, easier way to deploy specific D&D content into a game than adding the information manually. A notable book which seems not to be available on roll20 is the Dungeon Master's Guide, which any DM will likely want access to in some form. This is in keeping with roll20's core purpose. Roll20 is primarily about running and playing games, and not so much designing them, planning them, or providing reference information for them.
For owned content, like books, not as far as I know. You will not be able to buy a book on D&D Beyond and then use it in the roll20 compendium. There have been some community efforts to make some information portable through browser extensions and similar, but from what I understand this is limited to a few things, like character sheets. And I'm not sure I'd count community add-ons as part of either official service, but they do affect what value you can get from the service.
Depending on the content, you can manually transfer information from D&D Beyond to roll20. Without the roll20 versions of content, this can take a fair amount of work on the DM's part to set up.
There are probably some edge cases, and it'll depend on your personal preferences. Maybe. The free artwork available on roll20 can be hit or miss. If you're playing a published D&D module, and if you're going to be buying content like art packs and maps to enhance your roll20 game, you may get more value for your money to buy a book on roll20 to get high quality, official content which is easily deployed.
The rub is that a lot of that nice, roll20-specific content is only available in bundles which include the roll20 versions of several official publications, and so your ability to mix and match products is limited compared with D&D Beyond. A lot of that content is nicely designed for roll20, so the extra expenses might be worthwhile for you.
I, personally, buy content on D&D Beyond because I find it to be a superior organizational and planning tool, and planning the games takes more of my time and effort than running them. The support is just more meaningful to me in that context than it is in running the virtual tabletop. I typically write my own campaigns; however, if I were to run a published module such as Descent into Avernus, I would be very likely to also buy that module on roll20 if it is available individually. The easy integration of specific campaign content, particularly maps and character tokens, is appealing to me.
I don't know if there's a "typical" way, but for my games my players use D&D Beyond to manage their character sheets and we use roll20 for tactical battles. It's basically the same as our in-person games, where we use D&D Beyond character sheets for the campaign and I manually draw on a battlemat or print out battle maps. This works well for us.
I can't speak to how well character sheets and other tools relevant to running the game (mechanically) work in roll20, but if all-in-one integration is important to you and your players it may be a valuable feature.