I took your comment to mean that no button element exists, but I suppose that was not your intention. But I did realize you were referring to links being abused

I took your comment to mean that no button element exists, but I suppose that was not your intention. But I did realize you were referring to links being abused as buttons. I think the issue is simply that buttons tend to have more default styling you need to override, which is more likely to vary across platforms since the default style is generally chosen to mimic the system's native buttons. Whereas default styling for links is quite simple across all platforms. Besides that, there is no particular problem with using real button elements instead of link elements as far as I'm aware, just a matter of habit and convenience.