“Google has stopped supporting the rel=next/prev markup it launched back in 2011. The interesting part is, Google has not supported it for the past few years and didn’t tell anyone!”
Google hasn’t supported rel=next/prev for a while (thanks for telling us)
Imagine companies putting effort into implementing rel=next/prev, and Google ignoring this for years.
They apologized for this behavior (Google apologizes for rel=next/prev mixup), but, still, it’s not a pleasant thing to do.