I'm aware that I can already use the lookup history to go back through the items I'm exploring. However, using it puts me back into the default view for the item I selected. Clicking the current item on the other direction also works, but the scroll position was lost.

I've been spoiled with the Recipe Book mod in Factorio that lets me spam E to go back one step at a time, while also preserving my scroll location on the previous views. That way I can traverse into distractions without losing focus and needing to scroll back to where I was looking before.

Can you implement viewing history that also stores scroll position, and a back/forward button to navigate through that history?

This is reasonable, I've been meaning into making history traversal better, I'll look into it.

Oh worry not. I assumed this description was telling me that the current back functionality wasn't working, glad to hear it is. Either way, I will keep this bug open for adding forward traversal functionality.

I feel a little bit awful now that I've discovered that Back feature already exists within the mod, bound by default to Backspace. It's exactly what I wanted! Adding Forward and buttons on screen (or something else) to communicate that the feature exist could still be on the table though.

Forward has been added to augment history traversal. It will be released along with the 1.20.2 port in the coming days.