Macbook air M1 scrolls text in Firefox fast and smoothly...
I don't think it's performance bottlenecking so much as that the site is capturing the cursor and taking over its physics/acceleration, I think? Which probably isn't noticeable as long as the acceleration is similar to how your OS shell is configured, but was definitely noticeable for me on GNOME.
“then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration”
I don't know what graphics acceleration mean in this context, but my 5-year old computer, with 4 Gb of RAM and no discreet graphics card didn't witness any lag.