Reddit – Dive into anything

I’m implementing pagination on my e-commerce site, and need to implement canonical tags with them.

From what I see online (including Google’s recommendation), it says to mark each numbered page with their own canonical tag as they are its own unique URL and it’ll help Google get deeper into that respective categories and find out what items/products you have outside of page 1.

Wouldn’t it be better to just canonical back to the main page since the each page will have identical meta descriptions, title tags, h1’s, content, and essentially the same URL (minus the page number indicator)?

I see larger retailers such as walmart, home depot etc. do this as well. My inventory consistently changes and i submit my item pages via sitemaps, so is it bad if i canonical back to the main category page URL?