I think it was good in this case. They wanted to present a guided tour. May be they could have added buttons but this journey was nice overall.
Presenting an interactive experience and then taking away all control from the user and replacing it with an extremely frustrating navigation mode (hint, not everyone is using a phone/tablet or laptop touchpad - try to scroll that much with a mouse!) is just stupid and completely wasting the potential of the medium.
Yes. Does that matter? This particular work has terrible, user-hostile navigation controls, and needs to support free movement.
We could play Quake 2 in the browser several years ago, so it's not an unreasonable thing to ask for.