This is a clever trick (using mousedown to trigger a click), but breaks drag & dropping links, drag & dropping links to new tabs. and there is also a thing I tend to do: If I notice I pressed the mouse button down on the wrong link, I move the cursor away from that link and let the button go up on the correct or in free space, so the browser doesn't navigate (not sure how common this behaviour is, though)
Didn’t think of drag and dropping links to new tabs! Yeah, that’s a bit of a sad regression. The two other use cases you mention aren’t common at all though.
If it happens on all sites at the same time it’s one thing. If it happens on just your site I will just feel like your site is icky (and I might not even know why).