Yes, I stopped reading because of this.

I was as well, especially the yellow highlight/underline; I interpreted those as links at first.

Is that not what they were? I didn't click any of them, but I assumed they were links the entire time.

The pieces of highlighted text (such as "Terraform should have remained stateless" in the first sentence) aren't links, but I thought they were. The bits with just an underline ("this piece") are links, though.

Sidenote: TIL about the <mark> HTML tag.

Author, thank you! I'll tune it down a notch, this is most definitely helpful feedback.

I think it's to distract you from the vapid stupidity of the article