Does Jekyll incremental rebuild regenerate pagination pages when only one post changes?

I am working with a Jekyll site (4.x assumed) that uses both --incremental builds and the jekyll-paginate plugin, with paginate set in _config.yml. My understanding is that incremental regeneration only rewrites files whose source changed, but pagination pages are derived from the full ordered post collection rather than from any single source file.

That raises a consistency question: when a new post is added or an existing post's date changes, the offset of every subsequent post across paginated pages can shift. If only the changed post and its own output are regenerated, the older page2, page3, etc. files under _site could retain stale listings until a full build runs.

I have not found documentation that states explicitly whether the paginator's generated pages are tracked as dependencies of the posts they list, or whether they are skipped during incremental regeneration.

• Does Jekyll's incremental build mark paginated index pages for regeneration when any post in the collection changes, or are they treated as unchanged?
• If they are skipped, is a full (non-incremental) build the only documented way to keep pagination output correct, and does jekyll serve --incremental behave the same way?