Awesome points; didn't know about the Link header (RFC5988).

Regarding pagination: a few years ago I switched to using "skip" and "limit", instead of "page" and "per_page" or a variation of the two. Instead of thinking about pages (an abstract idea) it forces me to think about the concrete list of objects being requested from the resource, how many of those I want and how many to skip from the start; making it easier to reason about pagination (at least for me).