What's even scarier is when your browser "clicks" on the link by itself [1] and you don't even realize that you've just sent a request to some 'random' server and that server now has the log of your IP. If you browse 'questionable' sites, definition of which is growing by the day, you should be careful in which log your IP might end up in.
I now disable page prefetch on every browser I use. Some browsers don't even use it (which is a sensible thing in 2020 given the risk vs rewards of having it turned on).