Many moons ago I filed issue https://www.drupal.org/node/778050 again Drupal. That didn't go anywhere, because the pager was not pluggable and needed to be database-agnostic.
Happily, Backdrop only supports MySQL, so the pager changes should in theory Just Work™. This means that complicated queries no longer need custom count queries and the database doesn't need to run two queries each time a pager is displayed on the site.
I ran a lot of beanchmarks on the original issue and there was no performance degradation for small tables, and improved performance for large tables. You can see details at http://cafuego.net/2010/05/26/fast-paging-real-world
Recent comments
@yorkshirepudding, In the end I fixed it by deleting the config/active folder contents, copying the config/staging/ files into config/active, importing the database again and clearing the caches...
Importing the staged config throws an error: another field with the same name already exists
Thanks, I have to go out now, I will try later on and report back
Importing the staged config throws an error: another field with the same name already exists
Hi Francis. Yes, what config do you have in staging for it? You might have configs like: field.field.field_video_embed field.instance.node.page....
Importing the staged config throws an error: another field with the same name already exists