I actually use a variant of the Clickwheel on a daily basis.

I use a synaptics touchpad on a Thinkpad T490. There are Linux programs that allow you to control the properties of your touchpad. And guess what? Synaptics allows for 'circular scrolling'. I've seen it also written as 'chiral' scrolling.

But yeah, it works almost the same.

docs on how to set it up: [0]

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Touchpad_Synaptics#Circular...