Hello Christoph,
Thanks for reaching out regarding your paginated archives. I understand that you want to set them to noindex. Unfortunately, there is no option in the Yoast SEO plugin to do that.
According to Google, adding noindex on a page long-term will lead to them not following links on that page. More recent statements imply that if a page isn’t in their index, the links on it and from it can’t be evaluated at all.
We also usually do not recommend adding noindex to /page/2 and further on since it might lead to your products no longer getting the internal links they need. Because of what Google said about this, in Yoast SEO 6.3 we removed the option to add noindex to subpages of archives. You can read more details at https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/.
However, if you still want to noindex your paginated archive pages, you can use the filter located at https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/6310#issuecomment-268838291. You or your developer can customize it to your needs to only affect product category archives. You may also get in touch with your theme developer for further guidance.
