>I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there.

Yes, because after a century of public relations and marketing you expect fine print to be in these locations because you have been marketed to from infancy, which has made you apparently, forget that today's dark pattern creators stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, and the fact that you expect that stuff to be there is because your worldview has been successfully engineered. Important links under the fold, aka the first page are there to be overlooked. What they want from YOU is top of the page.

>Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway.

Careful with that kind of thinking, marketing works on everybody. A seed is planted, by appealing to emotional arguments. If it takes root, then your worldview starts to change, via rationalization. The smarter you are, the better and more subtle your rationalizations and better it works.

This project of social engineering was given to a guy named Edwin Bernays, who wrote several very plain and easy to read books on how he was going to do this project. First one was "The Engineering of Consent."