I had a lovely interaction with the Figma Twitter team and they suggested that I post my thoughts here.
I really like to use my pen tablet when working in Figma but there is currently no way to replicate ‘scroll zoom’ functionality as the tablet doesn’t have any touch panel or scroll wheel for this.
I would love it if Figma included the ability to hold a key+middlemouse to trigger scroll zoom (similar to panning). It would also be great if there was a zoom slider included in the app.
There is no “scroll zoom” trigger, these are two separate things. First you need to get your tablet to scroll somehow (in my case I did it with scroll/pan while holding one button + dragging):
Then you need to change scroll to zoom by holding ctrl/cmd in Figma. Hope this makes sense.