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_Looks awkwardly at the HN "flag" button_

I give you one of the biggest abusers: Google's Material Design, https://material.io

Each design iteration of that page keeps using buttons for links, links for buttons, links that look like plain text etc.

Kinda, but there’s no way a “Contact us” call-to-action in the middle of a hero is going to look acceptable as a plain underlined blue text. Some links need to be boxed and that makes them look like buttons. Not a lot of wiggle room there.

That ship has flown on some very long legs.

I see your point, and used to share it. But recently I’ve worked with professional designers that use this pattern quite a lot and my mind is now changed. For example I see nothing wrong with a link to e.g. a creation form looks like a button, nor is nothing wrong with a destructive action to have the lower visual weight of a link (e.g. delete this repo; flag this comment; etc.).

annotating from a public sample image:

https://i.imgur.com/VwD8DWi.png

How did they change your mind?