This is such a glaring omission, but I guess they don't sell a mouse with scroll-wheel so they don't care. Luckily there are a few 3rd party apps that sit in the menu bar, I'm using Scroll Reverser.

And the worst is that there's a toggle for each one, which changes the other. Since i only occasionally use the touchpad, it took me a few back and forths to realise that's what's happening and that i didn't misremember fixing the setting.

It might or might not be what you are looking for but it’s possible to charge the scrolling direction on the trackpad preferences.

It’s defaulted to “natural” something and it’s literally the first setting I change when I reinstall macOS

Ah sorry, I wasn’t clear. Setting the scroll direction there also changes the direction of the scroll wheel on a mouse.

I don’t have a mac near me but when I did, I could not get them set to be the way I wanted.

this tool might solve this problem: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

I agree with you 100%. This software accomplishes that: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/