I suspect my mental model is locked into the "drag scrollbar handle down" mode from the early mouse era rather than "drag page up" mode that is intuitive to people who's first computing device had a touchscreen.
There are some other alternatives like BetterTouchTool if you want some other changes like gestures, but as far as this specific problem goes you can just `brew install scroll-reverser`, set up the settings you want and forget about it. Life is too short to deal with this nonsense which is clearly designed to sell the Magic Mouse.