Do regular people care about these things or is this a hn thing?

I find a trackpad (even a Mac one) is absolutely infuriating to use compared to a decent mouse.

Battery life/screens/magsafe I'm plugged into a dock 99% of the time so it's irrelevant, but when forced to occasionally, the ergonomics of looking down at a single small 1x in screen is just terrible if doing it for hours and also makes my back feel horrible.

I might be weird but actively prefer the trackpad to keyboard and mouse as I can let my fingers rest on the keyboard at all times and use the thumb when needed to touch the excellent trackpad. That’s better than removing the whole hand to grab the mouse just to click something.

My home setup has both a trackpad and mouse (and a separate keyboard). I like them both. In practice I use 65% mouse and 35% trackpad I think. Trackpad is great for horizontal (or 2d) scrolling and gestures. Mouse has better ergonomics for accurate pointing, and is more natural in some apps (eg KiCAD).

I agree. Trackpads also come with gesture support for things like switching between windows which I found difficult to live without. Unfortunately it's not very ergonomic to use a laptop with it's trackpad when you're using multiple screens.

It ignores my scroll wheel most of the time if I try to scroll multiple times in a row.

The scroll is delayed significantly from when I scroll to when it actually scrolls.

The amount scrolled is inconsistent, sometimes it scrolls a very slowly a tiny amount because the page doesn't fit on the screen by an unknown tiny fraction, but if I scroll again because it is scrolling both slowly and with delay it now scrolls an entire page.

If I want to scroll past one of the demos I have to wait

If I drag the scroll bar on the side slightly it often snaps backwards.

It feels like I'm interacting with a phone/tablet screen on a computer, there's a reason why windows 8 failed.