Special:Preferences currently has a mix of buttons and linked text to link to other pages. There appears to be no clear reason for this choice one way or the other.

This is not quite true. The rule we introduced was is "anything that looks like a user action to set a preference but breaks you out of the form should be a button". Plain links are meant to target _blank so that e.g. the "preview" link for skins is an action that opens a new tab, but the "discussion" link that looks like it takes you out of the form does indeed do so.

We could make this interface much more consistent by simply removing all button styling and presenting these as normal links.

Yes, at a loss of user functionality. I don't think this is a great idea.

@Jdforrester-WMF Ah, very helpful context, thanks for sharing :)

In T324586#8447810, @Jdforrester-WMF wrote:

Special:Preferences currently has a mix of buttons and linked text to link to other pages. There appears to be no clear reason for this choice one way or the other.

This is not quite true. The rule we introduced was is "anything that looks like a user action to set a preference but breaks you out of the form should be a button". Plain links are meant to target _blank so that e.g. the "preview" link for skins is an action that opens a new tab, but the "discussion" link that looks like it takes you out of the form does indeed do so.

@AAlhazwani-WMF does this change your thinking around this design choice at all? What I'm hearing here is that buttons signify that there is a setting you can change, but you need to go somewhere else, whereas other plain links are primarily for providing additional context.