100% - I want to use whatever pager I might prefer at the moment, this advice violates their core principle "you make programs that are modular enough to be recombined as needed"
I find it far more convenient for tools to take options to use a pager, rather than to having to manually type "| less" for every command that I want to behave nicely. Just behave nicely by default; if I want you to behave awkwardly, I'll let you know!
For example, many pagers don't work well when stdin is line-buffered (they assume they'll see individual key presses as they happen)
Pagers can also conflict with keys that the terminal emulator is using for a different purpose. This is especially annoying when the terminal emulator is using those keys for pager-like functionality in the first place!
An example of both of these is Emacs `shell-mode`.
(I personally set `PAGER=cat` in my Bash profile, which avoids most of these shenanigans)