Why is the scroll bar in Windows 11 so narrow? In what world is this an improvement?

That works fine for a small scroll amount (a few paragraphs) but is unwieldy for scrolling a large document or long web page. Agree w/ the original poster on this, a cosmetic change that lessens functionality.

Yep, scrolling with the wheel through a pdf hundreds of pages long is not much of an option.

I don't know about the major issues of Windows 11 that irritate some people. I'm still encountering smallish changes (like the narrow scroll bar and the broken right click menu) that are annoying, esp. since the changes weren't necessary and don't make anything better.

What a silly comment. You could scroll using just the mouse wheel with the cursor anywhere on the screen in MANY previous versions of Windows, including Windows 10. I know this because I just had Windows 10 yesterday. Today, sadly, I have Windows 11. Sometimes you need to go deep into a web page, pdf, or document faster than scrolling endlessly, and in those instances, the scroll bar is a necessity.

I think what we are saying is PLEASE can we change the scroll bar attributes easily

As someone else pointed out, there's a setting in "Accessibility" to turn the scrollbars always on. On my desktop it makes them them wide and the scroll "puck" easy to use. I agree that the default was horrible. BUT IT DOESN'T WORK IN EXPLORER! The new Windows Explorer has so many deficiencies that I think I'll look for an alternative. Especially annoying is that it does NOT open the folder pane to the folder a file(folder) resides in so that it is visible (if you use a shortcut to access it). Also, the Path displayed is not always correct. I am not happy. I am 74 and have used every Windows version there has been. In many ways Windows 11 is a big step backwards.