As a trackpoint user, I am glad it's off by default.

Because of scrolling on Thinkpad keyboards (using the middle click), I had to turn that feature of every time, especially while working on longer documents I would otherwise accidentally paste stuff at random places.

(It's not just macOS.)

To you it is, plenty of people -including myself- don’t find it so. And considering the ratio of MacOS+Windows desktop users to those of ‘nix (an increasing number of which are new converts), middle clickers are a minority here.

But hey! At least they are only flipping defaults, not removing the feature outright, like they did type-ahead search. [Insert angry rant here]

I like middle click copy/paste but I really don't mind the change as long as I can still configure it with gnome-tweaks.

I was never a fan of it. I always turned it off. And now it also freed up middle click for auto scrolling which is actually great, especially when the scrollwheel is somewhat broken.

As someone that habitually highlights what they are reading it was generally beyond useless for me. It was actively making me mad when I accidenatally pasted some non-sense because I just highlighted a paragraph before and accidentally inserted it into something.

> only made because the same feature does not exist in MacOS.

Or in anything that's not X?

Speaking personally for me only, I don't think it's a great thing. The <however many> clipboards on Linux is... not really a great thing. I for one never know which of the buffers contain what. And this is compounded by the fact that selection may or may not overwrite what's in one of the buffers, and middle click may or may not paste whatever was in that buffer. Additionally compounded by how inconsistent the behavior is across apps.