A recent dark pattern I’ve seen is for news websites to add their home page to the history stack when you click a link to an article anywhere on that site so that tapping back doesn’t take you back to the page you were linked from.

if you long press it, you'll get a list of sites, so you can just skip back multiple at once

Yes, but every item in that list is the spam link, so what’s the point?

Browsers allow it because it's needed for single page apps and history-aware modals to function properly.