How should pagination be implemented in an ASP.NET Core Web API when returning large datasets?

Learn why returning thousands of records from an ASP.NET Core Web API can negatively impact performance, memory consumption, network usage, and user experience. Explore common pagination approaches such as page-number pagination, offset-based queries, and cursor/keyset pagination, along with appropriate request and response patterns. Discuss validation, maximum page sizes, sorting, filtering, metadata, and database-level pagination using Entity Framework Core. Consider which pagination strategy is most appropriate for high-volume enterprise APIs.