I prefer that I don't need to figure it all out - that the tools pipe lengthy --help to $PAGER themselves. Or open manpage like git does. I don't think this is ever used in noninteractive environment.
My two cents, do not do that. Git invoking PAGER is tripping me up every time. For example, if I want to cross reference terminal output and --help and the PAGER hides the entire terminal output
Been really tempted to integrate PAGER support into the cli library I maintain (clap which is for Rust)