And many of them don't even have a real click action, that I can find. I can't even right-click and manually pick "open in new tab", because the browser doesn't recognize what I'm clicking on as a link.

I agree, ecommerce sites are the place that I most often want to open several items in tabs and decide between them, and the place this function is most often blocked! I wish I could scream at the jerk who implemented this, but that jerk is not among the options of screamable people.

> the browser doesn't recognize what I'm clicking on as a link.

It's entirely possible the browser itself does, but that the site's JavaScript is (also) overriding the right click handler. There's browser extensions to override their override but having to do that is stupid.

I've installed one of those and it doesn't seem to help in the ecommerce case.

It's possible but this seems to be quite rare. In my experience it is always just that they think a div with an onclick handler is the same thing as a link.

why did we even allow this to be overridden in the first place? if you genuinely need that much control, stop shipping a webapp! JS canvas is another thing that really shouldn't exist

That’s because of React. The React Router is bad and people don’t spend extra time configuring it against its own bugs.

This one drives me nuts. I get it if it’s a single page app, but in many cases right-clicking the same link and choosing “open in new tab” works fine so that’s not the issue.

This usually happens in single page apps (SPA):

The proper way is to have an actual link but to override the behavior to navigate within the SPA. So if you click it, the navigation will be within the SPA but if you ctrl+click it, the browser takes over and opens the underlying link in a new page.

Typical issue is when a developer forgets to make it an actual link, but only inclides the SPA navigation.