I don’t actually see any good points against pagination in the opening, and I don’t see any reason to compare pagination to infinite scroll - in fact, I’d argue that comparing them means there’s a misunderstanding of the problem you’re solving for if you see them as equally viable options.

Imo, infinite scroll is for when you don’t care about ever finding something more than once while scrolling - instagram and TikTok are prime examples of this.

Pagination is the opposite - you have a set of data you want to be able to reliably navigate.

The bit about pagination taking up precious screen real-estate is silly, especially in light of the IS example having a whole search bar (I’m assuming the paginated example has an implied search bar but it’s not mentioned). Pagination doesn’t need to take up much space at all - whether your choice of pagination implementation is good for UX is a different beast.