In the late 90s the majority web of developers seemed to believe that the only proper way to link to a webpage was by running some messy JavaScript code
No, the majority didn't. Bad developers did stuff like this, and some are probably still using the same tricks right now.
The majority realised how stupid it was to do so, and therefore didn't create links like this.
I've seen some crazily bad website code in my time, include sites outputting their HTML using nothing but hard-coded document.write() calls. That doesn't mean the majority of developers were following suit.