ah, that was this
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/5f133e20f2bf0b051006396eb03f9fed95094b29
The reasoning was that the pull to refresh feature can accidentally cause reloads when someone is scrolling up a topic on a slow connection (so the posts aren’t loading fast enough). Fine reverting this if it’s causing issues or there’s a problem with overriding the default browser behavior, it’s currently only supported by Chrome on Android anyway.