After Effects on Mac: Use touchpad to scroll like in PS or Illustrator
It's so weird the way all the Adobe apps require different muscle memory to do the same thing. Even things that are the same like panning around a work area or zooming. I understand it's because of the history of the apps, but Adobe's acquisition of AE was over two decades ago, they've had time to standardise it.

Until they fix this (and don't hold your breath) you'll have to learn the AE way of navigating your comp window: hold (don't tap) the spacebar and click-drag with the left-mouse-button / single-finger-trackpad to pan and scroll, scroll-wheel / two-finger-slide to zoom. It will zoom to the point that is in the centre of the comp window, unless you hold the alt key while you're zooming in which case it zooms to the cursor. If youy want to zoom right in to the frame level press ;, press it again to zoom out to the whole comp.

Also useful are the , and . keys which zoom in and out (it makes more sense if you think about the &lt; and > symbols which also share those keys, but you don't hold shift) and ? which zooms to fill the comp window. You'll find that AE works best if you work two-handed. Dominant hand using the pointing device of your choice, the other working the keyboard. Efficiency in AE is all about keyboard shortcuts.