Yes, but the talk about all of the benefits makes it sound like you don't get those benefits unless you enable it all the time.
E.g. "The first and basic thing is it allows you to grab the scroll bar and move down the page quickly. You don't have to double finger scroll over and over to get to the bottom of a very long page. You can simply drag and pull it to your desired location."
You know what? if you move your mouse all the way to the right to scroll with the bar you can also scroll for a fraction of a second to reveal it so you can grab it.
Most non tech users never change the defaults on their phones/laptops. This means for those users, the scrollbar is effectively removed (other than scrolling).
Not having a persistently visible scrollbar means there's often no visual signal that something can be scrolled, or what the boundaries of the scrollable view are.
It's especially bad with flat UI design, to the point of being a dark pattern: in the Windows 10 and 11 setup process, there's a screen for opting out of various privacy invasions and other anti-features. Several of the options are completely invisible and undiscoverable until you start turning off the ones that are on screen, changing how tall those options are and revealing that the list is scrollable. Abuse like that is reason enough to always mistrust and hate auto-hiding scrollbars.
Again, disagree. This has it backwards. Microsoft isn't making it hard for you to opt-out because of the auto-hiding scrollbar. They're just taking advantage of it to make it harder in a new way. Before the scroll bar it was nesting it deep within menus.
> Before the scroll bar it was nesting it deep within menus.
I'm not sure which version of Windows you think predated scroll bars, but I'm pretty sure it didn't have any telemetry reporting back to Microsoft over the internet.
Not that simple. Just ran into it today where I was trying to scroll down a page and couldn't. Why? Because there wasn't anything more further down. In the past the scroll bar would of told me there wasn't anything more, but now I actively have to try (and fail) scrolling to 'discover' the fact that there isn't anything there.
You don't need to design your way out of a problem with a custom solution every time if you just add the scroll bar.
Being fooled into believing there's no more content is often incidental: some gap in the content aligns perfectly with the bottom of the window. (This is especially the case with designer websites which use a lot of blank spaces.) You shouldn't need a custom solution.
I wouldn’t consider having the website be designed to let you know that there’s more content a “custom solution”.
As for the rest of your comment. This really is a matter of preference. You’ve built a habit to look at the scroll bar. I’ve built a habit to try scrolling and see what happens.