It never left, do you have it enabled in your trackpad settings? I'm on High Sierra and I can do everything you just described with pinch to zoom.
I was going to update to Sierra possibly. But it won't do it anywhere other than preview for pics, and Safari. Not in Finder or Downloads for thumbs etc. A Google search shows many moaning about it. I messed with the trackpad settings. It didn't help. But there is a few buggy things on this OS I've mentioned before.
When I open an image from downloads folder, it opens and the folder slides off to the right giving me the desktop. I don’t want it to move, I want it to stay so I can open the next jpeg if I have to without always having to slide back to the folder. Can you turn off all these sliding pages, and just leave my desktop where it is?
I want to swipe back a page on the web browsing too, but when I use the old gesture to do that, it doesn’t give me the previous web page but it slides to another window… desktop or whatever.
I noticed there is a tick box when you log off to say do or do not open the programmes on start up, I’ve tried ticking and unticking but it STILL boots up and loads Word and Photoshop. Don’t want that either!
Finder window 'yesterday' and 'last week' etc were really useful, but can only see all the coloured tags now.
Just a few observes that make me really miss Snow Leopard. If they're all fixable, then great, but I've not seen anything obvious yet.