I am rough with mine (my first uses were on some IBM tank from the late 80s/early 90s when I was young and a Lenovo T61 in college). Spurious clicks and taps happen all the time when I end up using the things. I have spent minutes trying to get an Apple trackpad to perform to drag and drop and instead having it do every other thing from extra clicks on the way to zooming to running out of space when I get to the edge trying to get where I'm going. The fact that you can SSH in and use a more exacting interface is the best feature of the things IMO, but sometimes the UI is just the only way to get something done.

I also liked the matte texture of the ThinkPad, but I think that era is over (the XPS isn't glassy like Apple's at least, but still lacks texture).

But all of that crap is optional. The first thing a macOS user should do on a new machine is go to system preferences > Trackpad and turn that stuff and "Force Touch" off.

That doesn't help when I'm using someone else's Macbook.

Have you tried 3 finger drag? So much nicer than needing to apply pressure.

Doesn't that swipe between desktops/workspaces/whatever? On that note, I have no idea how anyone is supposed to discover these gestures. I had the same problem when I had an iPhone for a few months (long story): I became afraid to swipe anything because I never knew what anything would do and the lag on the thing meant that some widget could show up under my finger without knowing (something I really dislike about reflowing and progressively loaded websites too). The floating dot thing was also way more invasive than a button too.

FWIW, I have animation time set to 0 on my Android phone to avoid these kinds of behaviors but given that the primary interaction was through them on Apple, it was unavoidable.

By default yeah, you need to disable that gesture (or set it to 4 fingers) and then enable 3 finger drag in accessibility settings under trackpad. Aside from 3 finger drag though these are all in the normal trackpad settings, it's pretty clear about what does what and all of it can be disabled.

This used to be a regular (non-accessibility) setting, not sure why they hid it away a few versions ago.

In system preferences there are videos demonstrating all trackpad gestures in the trackpad settings.

I think most issues people have with using the trackpad are due to the fact that the default is that you have to click the trackpad like a mouse button in order to perform a "click." Most people coming from Windows want to use tap to click and I think that is what leads to confusing results.