The History API is pretty useful. It creates a lot of UX improvement opportunities when you're not polluting the stack with unnecessary state changes. It's also a great way to store state so that a user may bookmark or link something directly. It's straight up necessary for SPAs to behave how they should behave, where navigating back takes you back to the previous page.

This feels like a reasonable counter-measure.

It should be opt-in per website, per feature, because IMO it can be quite useful in some cases. Like clicking back on a slide-show bringing you to the overview page, instead of only going back one slide