It used to be that, if you wanted a link to come up in a fancy modal on your website, you'd capture the click event on that link and do your fetch for the fancy modal, so at least people could still _get to the linked page_ if their #JavaScript had fallen over.
Sometime in the last little while, it became fashionable to throw the link away altogether, and present a button that's styled to _look_ like a link, so now there's no way to get to the other page if your JS isn't available.
I still don't understand the motivation behind that.