except now their articles are littered with about 5000 superscripted footnotes, which IMO are more visually jarring than a different color of text.

True enough but for some reason a superscript is less distracting to me than a blue link. It's almost a compulsion for me to hover over each inline link to see where it goes. Hopefully this cuts down on that.

And it's a compulsion for me to follow every footnote to the bottom of the page to see what I'm missing... I guess that's what options are for. :)

You don't have to go down to the bottom of the page - you can still hover over the link and still click it, even though it's not blue and underlined.

I just mean footnotes in general. If I see [x] after a phrase, I instinctively feel the need to look up the footnote and find out what the author wanted to say or reference there. Adding footnote links that aren't actually footnotes would drive me crazy.