What would the wheel do otherwise? I don't want the scroll wheel to pan vertically. I guess doing nothing is acceptable, but I honestly zoom enough that I actually prefer the one handed action on my computer. I probably would just go back to double clicking if scrolling to zoom required a modifier, and that's worse UX because there's all sorts of stuff I could accidentally click on when double clicking to zoom.

If they do choose to go with a modifier, I hope it's not control, because I hate accidentally zooming the page with the browser's zoom since it breaks nearly every page out there.

Ugh, terrible UX. No, makes no sense. Users expect to use maps with scroll to zoom.

But this would compete with the browser zoom