In the architects defence, the precursor to using a mouse for drafting was to use a digitizer. This had a fixed area which was the drafting area, plus a customisable arrangement of 'buttons' around it (usually in the form of a laminated sheet stick into the digitizer board) which was the interface.

You could absolutely pick up the digitizer mouse and put it down into a different location on screen. It took me a bit of time to get used to drafting with a mouse after using a digitizer. It was so much less intuitive, so much less accurate, and didn't allow you to build muscle memory.