Yeah but wouldn't it be cool if when you spin the mouse wheel it takes ten revolutions and then the page scrolls over sideways, and then you spin it another ten times and it scrolls sideways to page three, etc?

True story. I forget where, but I assume they just didn't bother to test it on anything but a Macbook trackpad.

Shouldn't most of those be using Intersection Observers these days? That should avoid most of the cases where someone unintentionally breaks the user experience.

I'm not the person you are replying to but I have strong feeling that it's the latter. The scroll event has, IMHO, outside the annoying infinite scroll circus and the hijacks, a single good use: Lazy loading of expensive resources (then one would ask why it's not paginated in the first place but well).

I simply find it offputting for anyone to say "I as a web designer know better than you and will smooth your scrolling for you".

Well, even if we were talking about how to build scalable servers (we aren't), I feel like that's some sad, judgy gatekeeping to suggest that one needs to apply those same principles to their own blog else they need to receive such condescension in the comments.

It's like saying a real engineer builds their own blog. I wouldn't waste a single second of my life doing so, and the money I'm willing to spend on it reflects that as well. It comes off as petty, to me, to judge someone on this.

For example, I'm paid $100k/year to build scalable servers, not my cheap Wordpress blog.

I disagree with that one. Reinforcing your personal blog with a CDN would be a waste of money 99% of the time. It's also backend engineering, not frontend.