You are right, of course, and I stand corrected, performance and/or ability to fully replace less have no bearing on whether a program is a pager.
Nah I still wouldn't call it a pager. They used the correct term themselves as "text viewer".
I see memory efficiency as an issue, but not as a priority issue as it was 30 years ago.
In data science/industry it frequently happens for people to open files bigger then the available memory in less. "Big data" is a somewhat independent concept of the fact that RAM was smaller 30 years ago.