alt Hacker Newsit's a link. if your browser doesn't have some visual cue that a load is occuring (for me it's a favicon indicator and a visual loading bar) you're having a client issue.
>How does this make the accessibility problem any better?
it's not a UX decision to load slowly on poor uplinks (fwiw it's near-instant on my machine). obviously nobody would /choose/ to do that.
toasts, though, are a definitely conscious UX choice.
The :active pseudoclass has been used to change the appearance of links since the beginning. (Probably in part because loading links was considerably slower back then.) Not giving links an :active style is a bizarre oversight.