MDPI has some... ...ahem dubious practices, and may well be a predatory publisher.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5493177/
It was designed to accommodate highly JS-driven sites/apps, where user rarely, if ever, clicks on regular <a href="">, but notion of "going back" is still a thing.
Of course, this API also opened floodgates to all sorts of scammers.