Mice should always have worked like this

 Apple Macs use mice and Apple don't give you too many options for configuring them.

System Preferences / Mouse

That does give some control and of course it's optimised for Apple mice (which are really trackpads nowadays as they don't have wheels on anymore). 3rd party mice may well have their own software / system preferences pane to allow some adjustments.

3D Connexion Preference Pane

In their wisdom Apple make scrolling accelerate as it's used continuously, so scroll down a page and suddenly it can jump to the end because the scrolling has sped up (especially noticeable scrolling long pages).

Now there's a helping hand (well a little utility that lives in the menu bar) called LinearMouse and it'a free. It can be directly downloaded from the site (.dmg) or installed via Homebrew

#brew install --cask linearmouse

The source code is also available on Github so it's possible to build the app yourself (more importantly ensure it's not doing anything suspicious in the background).

Once installed a mouse looking icon appears in the menu bar and clicking it brings a dropdown menu showing the mouse options and click on LinearMouse Properties.

LieanMouse Preferences

Reverse scrolling does just that and the scrolling direction will be reversed, but the magic is enabling linear scrolling as this stops the scrolling speeding up. Once you enable it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it, it's a game changer.

One of the best utilities you'll find for your Mac (now of course Apple will integrate the functionality into a future version of macOS).