Why does Hacker News not make links open in a new tab?

You're talking about a subjective preference as thought it's an objective absolute.

Personally I prefer how it is. If I want it in a separate tab then I'll middle click or ctrl/cmd+click. As far as I know there's no keyboard shortcut which forces a `target=_blank` links to open in the _same tab_ when I want that behaviour.

The one I can't stand is when sites override default behaviours so you can't do either

Why should a link open in a new tab? Users here are technical enough to ctrl-click to open a new tab.

I don't want it to work that way, but if you're on desktop, you can just write a Chrome extension to add that for you, if that's how you'd like the site to behave. I made one to add an inline reply button because I wanted one.

If I wanted that behavior, I would use Tampermonkey to script my browser.

https://www.tampermonkey.net/

But that's me. Good luck.