As an academic that has published in, and reviewed for several MDPI journals, this total nonsense- they are a legitimate publisher. I haven't seen any signs of them being corrupt, predatory, or dishonest. Many of their niche journals are well respected in narrow sub-fields, and seem to be good quality. They also have very modern publication/typesetting/submission workflows that make them a pleasure to work with vs the older closed access journals. I would say they have lower standards for 'impact' vs more prestigious journals.... which means they play a valuable role in the field- they publish mostly technical methods, and other results that are interesting and useful to a narrow specialized audience.

Thank you for the feedback, I'm not at all an academic, so I'm curious as to your thoughts on the article I linked to?

Yes, I was wondering what the hell they did to my "back" button. Then I saw that I had "visited" the page something like 8 or 10 times just by clicking the article link here. How the hell does that work? And why?

How -> history API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API

It was designed to accommodate highly JS-driven sites/apps, where user rarely, if ever, clicks on regular <a href="">, but notion of "going back" is still a thing.

Of course, this API also opened floodgates to all sorts of scammers.