You appear to be referring to a database cursor.

It is quite simple to implement pagination in the application layer using a unique record identifier (primary key or ULID or ...) as an anchor for the navigation. From that unique ID, we can then fetch the previous `n` or the next `n` records, depending on the direction of the navigation.

This way, the server remains stateless, since the anchor (possibly sent as an encoded / obfuscated token, which can include some other parameters such as page size) is supplied by the client with each pagination request.

Unless I am missing something in your argument.