You can set custom knitr_print functions for data.frame objects. I wrote a demo gist and there are more details in this vignette.
If you just want all data frames to print as paged, add this code:
library(knitr)
knit_print.data.frame <- function (x, options, ...) {
rmarkdown::paged_table(x, options) |>
rmarkdown:::print.paged_df()
}
registerS3method("knit_print", "data.frame", knit_print.data.frame)