This is extremely stupid. All your examples are wrong. Maybe you should learn how to use a browser before you start complaining about programmers and their linking decisions.
First of all every browser out there allows you to decide if you want to open the tab in foreground or background. In case you want to open a page in background then tell me how can you accomplish the same staying in the same tab??? (You can’t). And if you want to open a page in foreground than the new tab is superior to the same tab version because you can just simply close the new tab and guess what?! you are back to the exact same pixel on the previous tab where you left off.
The worst of all that this f@cking site (that is Medium) demonstrates so well is that when you are in the same tab and let’s say you want to interact with people and want to respond to replies, clicking the response link navigates away but stays in the same tab, so you are out of context, you can’t see the original article that the responses are made for and on top of that when you click the back button to see the rest of replies and the original article the whole freaking page reloads again!!!
That’s same window navigation for you. Very clever! (No it’s not.)
Oh! And one more thing by the way, just to make it more fun, when you navigate back the replies are closed again (not only in Medium but also in Disqus et al.) so you have to click the “Show me all replies” button again and scroll down where you left off.
Wow! So so so clever! (No it is so so so not)