This has been default behavior for months (see T216450). We're open to discussions about changing it if there's a large community desire to do so, but this is the first time I'm aware of anyone mentioning it, and there were multiple reasons for implementing it in the first place, including but not limited to:

• not taking users away from the context of the Commons page they're mainly interested in
• allowing users to see Wikidata items without having to discard in-progress edits on the Commons page
• and more

It's obviously not technically a hard thing to change, but we did go through numerous discussions about it before we released depicts in April. If it turns out the behavior is hindering editing flows for many users, we'll look at alternative solutions, but we'd need more feedback to justify that.

If you want to add depicts it is helpful if you can see the image at the same time, even if it is just the thumbnail as a reminder.

My usual behavior is (and surely will be) to open these kinds of links in new tabs even if they don't have a target="_blank". Which doesn't necessarily mean my behavior is perfect, of course. :-)

(Adding Structured-Data-Backlog project tag as SDC Design / Structured-Data-Design project tags have been archived, and as tasks need to have an active project tag associated so they can be found on a project workboard. Not sure whether to also add Design.)