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