If you get lost press `f` to "fit" the current drawing to the screen.

By the way working in SolveSpace is extremely fast if you use keyboard shortcuts - almost everything can be dome with a shortcut key. No need to search for them - you can learn them by looking in the menus.

A very short "crash course" on the navigation is in the "Quick start:" section at the bottom of the download page. https://solvespace.com/download.pl The "demo video" on the home page is also a great starting point.

After that the "Tutorials" and "Reference" go in as much detail as one may want :-)

The mouse wheel zooms. The bounds of the axis stay fixed on the screen however. It will become more intuitive if you draw a circle to the screen first.

To pan around the space, use the right mouse button. To zoom, use the scroll wheel. To rotate, use Shift+Right mouse button.

Why not play with it a little bit before dismissing it so suddenly? I don't need to mention to a Solidworks/Autodesk user that CAD tools take some patience to understand properly :-)

This is expected behavior. The zoom action is into the cursor center. This is the same behavior of many other 2d/3d editors, such as Autodesk Autocad, Inventor, etc. Even MS Paint does this. If you place your cursor perfectly at the origin, it will not appear to drift.