API pagination design
This is trumpeted around and actually put into production every once in a while.The reason opaque pagination is an antipattern is because you can’t optimistically fetch resources.So your customer, the person that paying you for your product, needs to wait for some number of synchronous reads.With non-opaque offsets these can be done in parallel. If the typical request requires 4 pages, these can be done 4 at a time and of it is less than 4 pages those can be discarded.This is a clever hack that ends up being user hostile in actual practice. Remember APIs are designed for the benefit of the consumer vs the benefit of the maintainers.