Some of the defaults are just plain bad and assume you never want or need to use another computer. The scroll wheel thing is particularly bad. Like imagine if Apple decided all their laptops now were going to come with Dvorak keyboards instead of Qwerty. "Sorry Gram, I need to change your keyboard layout before I can solve your computer problem".

Don't mess with users' muscle memories for your design for literally no gain. That's bad design.

Honestly, I think Apple just forgets people use a mouse. The default trackpad scroll direction matches iPads and touchscreens. Their oversight was coupling trackpad and mouse wheel scroll direction. Until I had a job where I needed both I didn't really care...and I found an open source utility that addressed it[1].

[1] https://github.com/Caldis/Mos

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because your opinion is (in my opinion) perfectly valid. I spent 6 to 12 months forced onto a Mac by the company I worked for and I reached the same conclusion. Learning to subjugate one's personal preferences to the way the designers designed it is a good strategy on Mac (and to some extent Gnome on Linux).

I spent untold hours on Mac trying to recreate my Linux environment, and after cobbling together a number of different tools (some paid, some not) I got it pretty close - and then a new version of the OS came out and broke everything. It took a few months before most of the tools I used were updated, and due to accessibility API changes some of them never did get updated.