This is basically what the Scroll Lock key was meant for in the first place, but the convention never really caught on, so the continued presence of the key baffles a lot of people. I recall FreeBSD's console driver supporting using Scroll Lock in a similar way to move through the scrollback buffer, although I don't know whether this is still true in practice (e.g. if using a UEFI or drm console driver rather than old-school VGA).