I'm curious, is there a backend reason to only offer pagination? Is it less work on the backend vs a user making X calls to get all the resources anyways?

From embedded experience I would say it could be benefitial to do paging only if you operate under heavy memory- or latency-constraints. But most APIs certainly are not.

Of course the should be some sort of maximum size, but I have seen APIs that return 1200 lines of text and require me to page them at 100 per request with no option to turn it off.