Fair enough, but it is a different interface to touch, and it even has a separate (duplicated) home in settings. There's no good reason for it to be the same toggle.

(To me, the scroll wheel is reflecting the scroll bar on-screen, so I'm pushing it up or pulling it down. A touch area more naturally resembles the rest of the page/window, so I'm on board with 'natural scroll' - I'm pushing the page up or pulling it down.)

>IMO there is no objective reason why turning a plastic wheel towards or away from the screen should be the natural choice for scrolling down a webpage. It's just something that some people are used to.

Hard disagree. I move the mousewheel down to go down the page, and up to go up. That's natural.

Swiping around my desktop screens and apps like it's a tablet makes no sense. It's the very first thing I turn off on all Macs.

When I’m reading a piece of paper lying on the table and I need to focus on something at the bottom, I physically push the paper away from me, I don’t scoot backwards with the chair. Not saying that your preferences are wrong, I just firmly believe that “going down the page” itself is something that only happens on a computer screen and has no natural physical equivalent where moving something towards your body would make sense.

You pull the mouse body towards you to move the cursor down the screen, you pull the wheel towards you to go down the page.

The idea that you are touching the document and directly manipulating it and pushing the document up is a touch interaction model. Mouse interaction moves the cursor/view. It’s not “natural” but it’s in accordance with decades of mouse behaviour that “toward your body” is down.

Speaking of, “page down” acts like moving the page up. Mouse wheel down (towards you) matches page down, which is agreeable.