That's really interesting. It's like we've all been conditioned to just have unconscious clicking patterns to deal with this headache.

Opening up new tabs for things was definitely an easy solution on the table. But that's a pretty uncommon design pattern, and one that would probably drive our users nuts. Back button basically goes away as a habit, and then they'd have to learn that just for this app they need new muscle memory of ctrl+w. But yeah, definitely a design choice one could make.