There's probably a historical reason for this, but I don't know where to start looking for where this might be documented.
Specifically, instead of the cryptic "anchor tag" with a "hypertext reference" (well, I suppose terminology was different back then):
<a href="https://stackoverflow.com">StackOverflow</a>
why didn't something like this happen?
<link to="https://stackoverflow.com">StackOverflow</link>
What exactly did "anchor" mean anyway?
According to the W3 docs:
A link has two ends -- called anchors -- and a direction. The link starts at the "source" anchor and points to the "destination" anchor, which may be any Web resource (e.g., an image, a video clip, a sound bite, a program, an HTML document, an element within an HTML document, etc.).
I'm not an expert in the field, but I believe that it is merely because of the terminology at the time. Reading that article can provide more details about the definitions, but you may need to message the original authors or historians to provide a creditable answer.