I recall donationware being claimed to only provide a trickle amount - usually due to people being greedy and wanting to keep as much money as possible. Perhaps that was just that one person, but it’s still unreliable income source for the Dos shareware era.

Asking for donations doesn’t even solve the symptom of important software needing a team to scrounge funding. No publicly-important infrastructure should require begging.

I noticed this in video games rather than on-screen text scrolling. Some of them had a weapon selection, but instead had mouse-wheel-down “decrease” the weapon slot, and mouse-wheel-up “increase” it. However, the game also used the mouse wheel for other things, thus changing it to my preference had some unexpected side effect.

In any case, mouse-wheel to scroll view works because of the mouse-pointer paradigm. Move both mouse-wheel and mouse in the same direction, and the pointer is further along the content. Move them in opposite directions, and the pointer tends to hold position relative to content.