I'm completely new to Mac and one of the things that kept cropping up was the output of a command showing up and then clearing as soon as I exited it (e.g., git log).

I thought I had slain that dragon with a desperate plea to my Twitter timeline, but I was having to add one for each git command for which I didn't want the behavior. And I'm not even entirely sure blowing away paging entirely even made sense.

pager.branch=false
pager.status=false
pager.diff=false

Finally this morning I happened upon this article from 2014 that had the following suggesting I add it to my .zshrc:

export LESS=-iXFR

Finally it's solved and I could cry happy tears.