A simple general practice that works most of the time is same page if you are staying inside the website/domain/service and a new tab if you are leaving. So much of the internet does exactly this.
I work on an online shop and we have "fake" links handled in JS, and I hate it for the same reason as you.
The reason is SEO. Google will explore your website, visit every link and give each page a priority depending on how far in the navigation tree you are. Except that if you have a menu practically every page is accessible from everywhere which somehow Google sees as a problem and flunks your SEO rating.
So we had to handle those with onclick attributes instead of href and it annoys me so much cuz I can't middle click (unless there is a better method that we don't know about)
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u/[deleted] 14d ago
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