As far as I can tell, while a couple of distributions may patch this differently, the majority keep upstream's auto-pager behavior. As described earlier in this bug, the tool that is having trouble with this seems to be intentionally trying to make programs think they're running interactively with a TTY. When doing so, other programs automatically use a pager as well (e.g. git), and setting variables like PAGER=cat or similar seems appropriate.
I don't think anything needs changing here.
