[1] At least, I hope it's a bug.
Anyways, the end result has been I don't use reddit at all on the phone, so kind of ended up being good for me anyways.
On my phone? Yes, absolutely, impossible to hit the links correctly even if I zoom in. Both old reddit and HN is "Fully functional" on desktop, agree, but far cry from "fully functional" on my arguably tiny iPhone.
it's dead, per official comment from reddit.
You and I are very different Reddit users. I don't think I've even seen r/all for at least a decade. I exclusively view Reddit via the old.reddit.com URL in desktop mode with the Reddit Enhancement Suite add-on + uBO + a custom CSS theme. I'm automatically redirected to my 'Subscribed' page showing only the dozen or so niche subreddits I care about, none of which have more than 100k subscribers (most are under 25k). It's glorious... like a time machine to before Reddit enshittified itself and spammers, astro-turfers, shills and influencers took over.
Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab. (???)
Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.
The issue is hardly isolated to news outlets. It's endemic to the web.
Look what happened with Netflix. They actually got it right, a reasonable price for a bunch of stuff which would end up appropriated based on demand (they needed to have the disk to rent.) And how you have a bunch of players trying to compete in the space, each with it's exclusive content to try to make you choose them.
And look what's happened with Google's "news". It's more and more and more clickbait. I used to think the answer was a small charge per article, run through some aggregator that tracked payment. But these days we see things designed to get you to open the page, not to actually provide value. Or look at the problems Amazon has had with it's Kindle Unlimited stuff--books designed to game the metrics, groups engaging in read each other's books behavior etc.
Just speculating, I can't imagine a reason why they'd implement this especially for Safari.
Other than A/B-testing or trash code that coincidentally doesn't work in all mobile browsers.
Maybe they use the same AI that generates their fictious relationship stories to add these dark patterns to their code base :D