At least Apple lets you turn it off. Go to Settings -> Battery -> Options and change "Wake for network access" from "Always" to "Only on power adapter" or "Never".

Mine is on never, so as usual, macOS settings are useless.

(like switching the scroll direction between touchpad and mouse, where you have two separate toggles which toggle each other. "Just works" my ass)

You likely want to turn off Power Nap, in addition to wake on network access.

For the scrolling, https://github.com/ther0n/UnnaturalScrollWheels is wonderful

Cool, another third party random project I have to run to get macOS to not actively suck (like window management with rectangle, custom shortcuts with Karabiner).

Yeah, it's pretty annoying at first, coming from Windows and most desktop Linuxes where those things are out-of-the-box. Then you still have to shim in a package manager (brew etc.), git (xcode CLI just for an old version? sigh), etc. It's even worse trying to get a gaming setup going, between dealing with mouse scrolling and acceleration differences, Rosetta and GPT (game porting toolkit, not the AI stuff), etc.

At the end of the day, I don't think us dev types and power users are the core audience for Apple =/ We're just a niche. But at least once you have it all set up, it mostly keeps working after that.

I just hope they don't lock down macOS like iOS and iPadOS altogether. Presumably they'd always need a machine like that if only to develop for iOS and iPadOS and such... fingers crossed.

It's definitely an "enjoy it while it lasts" mindset for me though, like everything in tech.

Do you have any weird corporate management software running on it? That can do all sorts of nonsense, unfortunately.

If not, turn off "Power Nap" (https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mh40774/mac - the option is, annoyingly, kinda hidden.)

Same. Including weird audio clicks during supposed 'sleep' (already happend during heavy load while awake). Then one day this summer it just died without any recourse.