The back button is broken, too. Was it that hard to bring you back to the comment you were reading when you clicked the link? Guess so.
And now it renders Gifs inside replies and every single fucking thread has the "omg gifs!" thread voted to the top.
The modern Reddit UI is a complete and utter tragedy of design and engineering. But it serves ads, so who cares.
They only redesigned it so that they could make ads first-class.
And which becomes more difficult when sites break middle-clicking and other shortcuts to open links in new tabs, or when the "links" ain't actually links but just something on which they tack on an onClick() and run a bunch of JS to reinvent the concept of a link.
What we need is something that locally duplicates the page state into another tab. But then, sites already break that by a) firing off requests that can be dangerous to duplicate (not idempotent) and b) synchronizing state across tabs (argh!) so you can’t have different state in different tabs for the same domain (or just session, idk).
Facebook is notorious about that last bit and won’t let you eg have one tab with your feed best visible and another with a conversation hovering over it all.