I was going to file a bug report but I realized that this isn’t a bug per se but more of an inconsistency across different ways to adjust volumes across the plasma shell.
TL;DR: Sliders in Plasma don’t respect natural scrolling settings which I think is fine. The new feature to adjust volume by scrolling the task manager icons does respect natural scrolling and thus is inconsistent with the rest.
Let’s get the controversy out of the way first: I think the bug which is still open https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390777 should NOT get fixed. It is about scrolling over sliders in libplasma in general but also applies to my case here. I think, even with natural scrolling enabled, moving UP on the touchpad should always INCREASE volume or INCREASE brightness no matter the “invert scroll direction” setting. This behavior makes sense because visually, a slider always should move in the direction the fingers or the scroll wheel moves no matter the invert scroll direction setting.
The inconsistency now is with the new scroll to adjust volume on hover feature introduced in Plasma 6.6. It DOES respect scroll direction settings and thus doesn’t behave consistently with the other volume adjustment scroll actions. So for me, scrolling DOWN increases volume because I use the natural scrolling direction setting.
Do you think we should ask to get rid of this inconsistency? I tried the new feature and immediately was confused because scrolling on the Task Manager Widget behaves differently from hovering the slider below the task’s thumbnail which is just a few pixels away.