I'm not defending the stupid touchpad because it is indeed awful, but I worry you're not taking advantage of literally its only feature, because you say "lacking the exponential fast forwarding". The only reason I keep that annoying thing enabled at all, or that I don't just have it learn a random "real" remote and use that, is how
good the Apple remote is with FF/Rewind. Assuming your streaming app is using the correct "native" video player, you're meant to hit (Center button) to pause/bring up the scrubber, then swipe quickly horizontally across the touchpad to move the playhead in large chunks. It's very accelerated, and if you need to say, rewind a movie from the credits to the beginning, it's about 3 swipes if you're swiping fast and vigorously. If you swipe slowly, on the other hand, you can go a couple minutes at a time.
Finally, if you want to jump a few seconds instantly, like if you just missed a few lines of dialogue, the thing to do is to physically press down the left or right directional pad (the edges of the circle) while praying to the touchpad gods that you don't accidentally quiver by 0.2mm and be detected as a swipe which will do the wrong thing.
Of course, it's proof of Apple's poor usability that literally anyone reading this who owns the device doesn't already know how to do all three of those functions. But we're still at the peak of the fad of 'minimalism' instead of putting dedicated buttons for each of these in an ergonomic arrangement and printing labels on them.