Preventing Pagination of Subdirectories Follow-up

I’m having a similar issue brought up in this reply last year:
How to paginate a subdirectory? - Zola

My project directory looks like this.

content/
├── _index.md +++ paginate_by = 5 +++ 
├── about
│   └── index.md
├── blog
│   ├── _index.md +++ transparent = true +++ 
│   ├── first_example.md
│   └── second_example.md
├── guides
│   └── index.md
└── projects
    └── index.md

The entries in the blog section are the ones I want paginated in index.html (and is set to be transparent, accordingly), and the about, guides, and projects pages should not be. However, I don’t want to put these pages in a subsection like pages/[about,guides,projects] as mentioned in the linked reply because I want to maintain the URL structure website.com/[about,guides,projects] and asset co-localization for those pages. How would I go about doing this?