What makes up for this, to some extent, is that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item in OSX: go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, click +, select the application (or all applications), type the menu name and set a shortcut.
There's a lovely piece of software called SensibleSideButtons to deal with that. Back in the day, everybody used USB Overdrive to overcome OS X's shortcomings with the mouse. Alternatively, BetterTouchTool is a nice little piece of software for setting custom shortcuts with any mouse button and/or trackpad gestures.
I still use USB Overdrive to make a physical scroll wheel work without crazy acceleration. Without it, macOS seems to scroll just a pixel on the first click of the wheel, maybe two pixes on the second click, but if I scroll a bunch, it jumps half the page. With USB Overdrive I can set it to just always one or two lines of text per click.
The other thing about OS X is that command-shift-/ opens a little search box in the help menu and then you can pick any menu item by typing a few characters and selecting it with the keyboard.
