That’s still unacceptable by western standards. In the US, which is not as free as it declares, there’s a whole category of TV shows insulting the president. Zero repercussions.
The problem is that “serious laws” in China are unacceptable in the west. You can be in serious trouble for talking about Winnie the Pooh, think about that. That’s just one example.
HTML means HyperText Markup Language. HyperText means “documents linked to each other”. By not using <A> you’re skipping the core reason why HTML exists, as defined by its name.
The other comment explains pretty well what that causes in the browser.
The use case seems to be very obviously isolation (archived site can’t affect archive.org’s header), although I think iframes would have been a much better solution to this)
Judging by people who make links via click listener on DIV, the answer is no.
On one side it’s understandable that people work more on abstractions and are more productive (e.g. learn React first, then maybe understand how P is different from DIV), on the other side it’s incredibly frustrating to see links that aren’t real links even on Google’s websites.