Say you drop a Collection Teaser section on your homepage, something like "Latest from the blog," a handful of posts as a preview block. Works fine. Then your blog grows past eight posts and you want to show more of them, so you go looking for a way to bump the number. Right there in the settings sits a checkbox called "Enable pagination," with a "Posts per Page" field underneath it. Sounds exactly like what you want. Check it, set it to 20, save, and nothing changes. Still eight posts.
Here's what's going on. Sitting right above that pagination toggle is a different one: "Limit total number of posts," on by default, set to 8. Both settings do the same job, capping how many posts the section shows, and when both are active, the limit wins every time. Not "usually." Wins, full stop, with no warning that the pagination number you just typed in is being ignored. You have to go turn the limit off first before pagination gets a say.
Turn the limit off and set pagination on, and you finally get more than eight posts. What you still don't get is pagination. No page two. No next or previous buttons. The section shows however many posts your per-page number allows, then stops, same as the limit toggle did, just wearing a different number. It's a second cap with a paginator's name on it, not a paginator.
Real pagination does exist in Cantrip, just not here. It lives on the collection's own listing page, the one with working next and previous links, if that page is turned on. The Collection Teaser section knows it can't get you there itself, which is why it adds a "View All" button under the preview pointing at that listing page, so anything past the cap stays reachable. No listing page enabled, no button, and whatever's past your cap simply isn't reachable from this section at all.
None of this is broken. A short preview block on your homepage with a link to the full archive is a completely normal pattern, it's what most sites do. The problem is just the label. "Enable pagination" promises something it doesn't deliver: it's a second cap, not a second page. Want more posts visible in the preview block? Raise the number, not the checkbox with that name on it. Want a real, browsable list of everything? That's what the listing page is for.