Those "mobile special" layouts are annoying enough on their own on a phone (with their dumbing down of the UI), but they are doubly annoying when you're used to the web version of a website, and have to hunt for things in the "responsive" mobile version.
"responsive design" does not magically eliminate this need, and I agree with the posters saying that disabling of user-scrolling should never have even been allowed in the first place.
And that's not even touching on the fact that most "responsive" sites I've seen get it horribly wrong.
Not being able to zoom in to at least 2x, is a pain... if your content doesn't overflow, then sure set the minimum zoom to 1x, and the max to 2 or 3.. but disabling it altogether is just painful to experience... and many of the "suggestions" to fix mobile scaling include disabling zoom. I'm not even that old (40), but I imagine the problem is worse for people well into their 60's.
If you're using a font-size less than 12pt, you should emphatically NOT be disabling scaling... Unfortunately many sites/apps do just that, and often don't respect the usability settings in the OS (facebook on android was particularly bad, as in too small, before I uninstalled it).