Faith is answered with salvation, thus leading to works.
Works are a good indicator; if there are no works, then there wasn’t likely any salvation. That is Paul’s point of view, and Paul was the only one to receive direct infusion of the gospel from Christ himself; the others had to figure it out piecemeal.
No, it's teased out by some using some parts of Paul and not others and then ignoring contradictions in other scripture.
We can be pretty sure salvation was important to Paul, he wrote quite a bit about it. If his point of view was: "We are saved by faith alone," he almost certainly would have said so. But he didn't.