Hi,
Thank you for all the details!
Unfortunately this is not accidental. At the moment there is no way to not reload the page as the event handlers on the pagination can’t be reattached so it defaults back into normal pagination.
I have raised an issue about this on our issue tracker. I’m working on some other features right now, but I marked it to the next release milestone. I think I have a polyfill solution for a similar issue with Elementor, will check if it can be applied to the query loop as well.