The Mac trackpad is tuned for the average user, which means it is usually wrong for you. These are the changes worth making, in the order that removes the most misfires.
Start with the misfires
Click pressure. If the trackpad clicks when you rest your hand, set it to Firm. This fixes more accidental clicks than any other setting.
Tap to click. Turn it off for a day if you get clicks you did not intend. If you miss it, turn it back on; if you do not, you just removed a class of errors.
Look up & data detectors. This is the popup that interrupts text selection. It is not Force Click, and turning it off does not disable pressure. Set it to Off, or move it to a three-finger tap.
Force Click. If you press hard while dragging, turn the deeper press off. You lose the system haptic click with it, so most people should fix Look Up first.
Then the speed
Tracking speed. One notch below maximum is the precision setting. Maximum feels fast for a day and twitchy for a year.
Do not change tracking and scroll speed in the same session. You will not be able to tell which one caused the overshoot.
The gestures
Swipe between pages. Keep it. Two fingers, two pages, it works in every browser.
Mission Control. Pick three or four fingers and stay there. Switching between them is how people end up saying gestures are unreliable.
Three-finger drag. It lives in Accessibility, Pointer Control, Trackpad Options, not in the Trackpad pane. Enable it only if you drag windows or select long passages all day; it collides with three-finger swipes and Look Up.
Do not enable every gesture just in case. A gesture you do not use is a gesture that fires by accident.
Where macOS stops
macOS gives you one global layout. It cannot give Safari and Figma different controls, and it cannot put brightness and volume on the pad edges. Those need a third-party layout app. If the settings above are enough, stop there.
The full version, with the exact paths and the conflict table, is here: https://trackstudio.xyz/blog/best-mac-trackpad-settings
