Paginate pages with disabled rendering

I’m trying to create a page where cards with an image and some text are paginated. Note that there is no need for sub pages - I’m trying to create a paginated gallery.

There is no way to paginate a TOML array in page [extra] as the docs states only sections and taxonomies can be paginated.

I’ve tried putting content for each card into a section page and set render = false to each page, but pages with disabled rendering are ignored by the paginator:

{% for page in paginator.pages %}

does not iterate over those pages.

The closes I have gotten to the desired behaviour is put template = "404.html" to each page since then it looks like there are no pages from the user perspective, but the generated public tree is bloated with a directory and a index.html that is a copy of the 404 page for each card.

This post seems to be related.

Is there a way to force a paginator to include pages with disabled rendering? Is there a better way of achieving what I want?