Wrong canonical tag on pagination pages

Question

Canonical tag must point to the starting page, not current pagination page.

Example:

URL: https://site.com/category

Tag: <link rel="canonical" href="https://site.com/category">
---
URL: https://site.com/category?start=30
Tag: <link rel="canonical" href="https://site.com/category?start=30">

Second example is wrong, canonical has to point to
https://site.com/category as well.

Answer 1

According to Google, what you suggest "Canonical tag must point to the starting page" is wrong.

In this page, it reads:

Don't use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page. Instead, give each page in its own canonical URL.

And I'd say it makes sense. I mean, each page has different content.