I understand your point, nobody is claiming that separating the bread and milk is a particularly good experience either and while it probably makes more money in a physical store where you want to buy multiple options at once, this doesn't apply to AirBnB with a single item checkout. The search at Amazon almost always gets me what I want on the first page, which is the desired behaviour almost everywhere to reduce friction to checkout. Why would I want to increase user frustration and bounce rate on a single product checkout?

I imagine significantly reducing database calls and blob downloads due to short-sighted pagination behaviour would result in significant cost saving, reduce bounce rate and increase conversions.