Can't we simple parse and remove any style="display: none;", aria-hidden="true", and tabindex="1" attributes before the text is processed and get around this trick? What am I missing?

If you do that and don't follow robots.txt, you are blocked. If you do that and follow robots.txt, fine. That's all we wanted you to do anyway. Just follow the instructions that well-behaved scrapers are meant to follow.

Just have the link visible, but css it so that its either small as hell, or just off screen. Google / bots will follow it, real peopple will never see it.