Homepage or list template for /pages/X/ links?

I’ve read the templating docs several times; and I’ve also read https://discuss.gohugo.io/t/layouts-101-the-littlest-layout/305 and https://discuss.gohugo.io/t/creating-a-minimal-working-template/135

But something still isn’t clicking for me. My understanding is that the homepage template should be used for the home page: that is, the default page served to visitors. Paginated content of my historical posts should be using the list template.

But this does not seem to be the case? Changes I make to my list template do not alter the generated pagination pages. Rather, the content on the pagination pages appears to be generated using the homepage template.

Specifically, what I would like is to show the full content of my most recent post plus the titles of the next X number of posts on my home page; and have all paginated post pages display simply the date and title for the posts included in that pagination sequence.

If it’s the case that the homepage template is used for these paginated posts, that’s fine and I’ll adjust accordingly. But this nuance seems worth noting on the documentation.

I don’t know if it’s relevant to my problem, but I am creating all content in the root of my /content/ directory, and not applying any specific “type” to them in their front matter.

(Apologies for lack of more precision: the forum software keeps complaining that new users are only permitted to submit two links, and it seems to be incorrectly parsing my attempts at listing file paths to templates as URLs.)