Let me explain why you have reached the wrong conclusion. The key is to think about why the markup is needed. Is it to format documents, to make them 'readable'? No, it's to tag documents with semantic meaning that computers can use to enable richer content and behaviours. That's why, for example, tags like `<b>` and `<i>` are nowadays widely accepted to be design mistakes in HTML, and we use CSS instead for formatting. That's why we encourage semantic markup like `<section>`, `<nav>`, and even `<div>`.

Hyperlinks are one of the basic semantic markup tags. They allow machines to read them and insert jump points. The key here is that they are machine readable to enable behaviour that wouldn't be possible otherwise.