Why can no laptop manufacturer even make this an option?
I've not had to configure anything to make this work for a number of years now in Plasma. Though I've been running Linux on Macbooks for a long time, so maybe it's about specific hardware support.
I own an nc8430 and a ZBook 15 first generation. I use the lower row of three mouse buttons as left, middle and right click. Those touchpads don't move and don't bend. I disabled tap to click as buttons are much better and never move accidentally the pointer by design. Palm detection works very well, basically no issues. I use two finger scroll and pan. Several gestures work but I don't really like them. I disabled everything. I rather use keyboard shortcuts. I defined some of my own especially to navigate among virtual desktops.
There is still one ZBook Fury model with buttons, every other model lost them.