It's not a real link - some JS magic is happening behind the scenes. Otherwise there would be a confirmation something is happening like the browser's usual spinner.

> that's just an <a href> link. the only latency is your browser pulling the (admittedly, unnecessarily large) page

I fail to see the relevance of your comment. So you came up with an explanation of why the page might have awful accessibility. How does this make the accessibility problem any better?

> would you prefer some static hydration garbage?

I think everyone would prefer to not wait 3 seconds to get feedback on what they clicked. We're talking about accessibility, right?