"Pinch-zooming is great for taking a closer look at a photo, some small print, or dealing with a set buttons/links that are placed too closely together. It's an out-of-the-box accessibility feature."

No! Pinch-zooming is fantastic for navigating content. It lets you see an overview of the whole page, then zoom in on the bit you're interested in. It lets you control how much is seen on screen depending whether you want to read it in depth or skim it. It is a key feature of browsing the web on mobile devices. Mobile websites that disable pinch-zoom by using enormous text on extremely narrow fixed-width pages are a pessimization, and are almost always worse than the desktop page rendered on the mobile.

That's my opinion. I search in vain for a browser whose "view in desktop mode" actually works.