You can still use :visited to change the link color, that's still supported, and it's the most common way a visited link is styled differently from an unvisited

You can still use :visited to change the link color, that's still supported, and it's the most common way a visited link is styled differently from an unvisited link. This way nothing gets positioned differently because a link has been visited, and javascript can lie about a link's colour. So this sounds like a deliberate design decision, or at least a genuine design trend.