[dkuntz2]

The exact opposite of an ELI5, but a very well written and in-depth overview on why touchpads suck outside of macOS: https://pavelfatin.com/scrolling-with-pleasure

the tl;dr is that when touchpads were added to windows, they used the legacy APIs which made assumptions about them being mouses with notched scroll wheels. And while microsoft has since released APIs which support high precision scrolling, applications have been slow to adopt them (sometimes because of wanting to be compatible with windows 7 and older).