While many people might have another keyboard hooked up to their computer, that wasn't the case for me. You can be sure by disabling bluetooth (if your main keyboard is wired).

Other problems I've researched include: specific websites mess with CMD+Click via javascript either intentionally or accidentally. To debug, try a few different websites. If it's just one website that you really want CMD+Click to work on, there are some chrome extensions you can try, I haven't used any of them.

Make sure your CMD key works correctly. The OP in this thread did this via using CMD+0 or CMD+1 to navigate to different tabs.

Not sure what my issue was, but restarting the OS fixed it. Give that a try. Good luck.

Speculating here, but will confirm later from a Mac. This has been confirmed to be working on a Mac.

Win ctrl+click or a Mac command+click gets picked up by a "normal" click listener, just like a click with any other modifier key (alt+click, shift+click etc).

This is particularly confusing since a ctrl+click on a Mac gets interpreted as a right-click on OS level. Command-click, on the other hand, is not interpreted as a middle-click but rather is a browser preference.

Assuming that you do not have in-site functionality that specifically relies on modified clicks, it would be appropriate to exclude such events from click listeners, and instead allow for them to bubble up to be natively handled by the browser. Given the experience of someone in the similar situation, you should be able to add the following to click handlers (likely a delegate on library level as pointed out by Brilliand):

if (e.metaKey || e.ctrlKey) return;

When added at the beginning of the handler with e referring to a current click event, this should circumvent any following e.preventDefault();

Update:

It actually works! In this rather minimalistic fiddle, I am able to recognize when command-clicked or control-clicked, so as to avoid executing the rest of the click handler which includes ajax-fetching the content and e.preventDefault();. This allows for a command-click to be handled "as intended" on a Mac, i.e. opening the link in a new tab.

With this finding in mind, these lines should now read

if (e.isDefaultPrevented() || e.metaKey || e.ctrlKey) {
    return;
}

JavaScript behind the scenes

This happens when developers of such web pages intercept mouse clicks with JavaScript and do asynchronous network requests inside the interceptor, potentially to track your clicks. When the async network call returns, the JS does a programmatic redirect using something like: window.location.href = url;

This programmatic redirect will always load the page in the same tab, even if you hold Ctrl (Cmd on Mac).

Use MiddleMouse to override

Clicking middle button on your mouse or selecting 'open in a new tab' from the context menu will bypass the intercepting JavaScript code entirely and will open a link as if there were no JavaScript code at all.

It is because of JavaScript that captures your clicks and, because of that, interferes with your keyboard shortcuts. If you disable JavaScript then shortcuts should start to work again. You can test it by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+I (Developer tools), then clicking Settings (gear icon) and enabling option Disable JavaScript.