Pagination on template page for custom query redirecting to index.php

I'm building my first theme and have a template page page-blog with a custom wp_query. I've tried adding pagination to the query but so far the pagination redirects to the index page. As expected the url structure shows /blog/page/2.

What am I doing wrong here? Do I need to just create my own pagination method?

div class=blog-listings
        ?php
            $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
            $args = array(
                'post_type' = 'blog',
                'post_status' = 'publish',
                'posts_per_page' = '2',
                'paged' = $paged,
                'orderby' = 'date',
            );
            $blog_loop = new WP_Query( $args );
            if ($blog_loop-have_posts()) : 
                while ($blog_loop-have_posts()) : $blog_loop-the_post();
                    include('template-parts/content/content-single-blog.php');
                endwhile;
                $total_pages = $blog_loop-max_num_pages;

                if ($total_pages  1){

                    $current_page = max(1, get_query_var('paged'));

                    echo paginate_links(array(
                        'base' = get_pagenum_link(1) . '%_%',
                        'format' = '/page/%#%',
                        'current' = $current_page,
                        'total' = $total_pages,
                        'prev_text'    = __('prev'),
                        'next_text'    = __('next'),
                    ));
                }    
                wp_reset_postdata();
            endif;
        ?
    /div