You're never going to get rid of tight links - even SG has them. The thing is whether those links are necessary to get close to the character's potential. I'm fine with most stuff being relatively easy, but people will always aim the highest dmg/stun/positional advantage even if it means a harder combo, and I'm fine with this too. Perhaps my perspective is warped because I play a character with 1f bnbs, but I actually like difficult combos and find combo systems that don't at least giveyou the option to squeeze a bit of extra damage out with some finesse are less interesting.
1 frame links are an incredibly boring way to design optimal damage into the game (and SF4's 1 frame link combos, even if they might not have been intentional in vanilla, are intentional by now due to non-removal, and buffs allowing 1f link combos). They do not require an advanced understanding of the game or your character, outside of counterhits or meaties giving extra advantage to set up a 1 frame link, and no new skills to be build outside of "hit a button within a small time frame".
Other fighting games often require you to find new, creative ways to utilise movesets that alter your opponents hitstun and movement in histun, as well as your character's movement if you want to optimise damage, as well as being able to convert off of a variety of situations. Juggle-based combos are the majority in these kinds of systems, and allow for more freedom and opportunity to show advanced application of character mechanics than just pressing a button within 1/60th of a frame.
Even amongst some 3S characters for example where they're pretty much figured out now, they had combos that required an advanced understanding to discover and utilise. Ken had kara-DP combos, Makoto has SA2 dash cancel/jump cancel and backwards kara-inputs for truly optimised stun combos, Urien has tight charge partitioning out the arse, and Yun has the entirety of Genei Jin and optimising from each conversion vs each character in each situation is not a small or easy task. These are all not exactly -necessary- to play the characters as well, but help at a high level. The majority of basic confirms in 3S was just normal->special, normal->super, or normal->special->super. Tight links also existed but were not the norm as far as I know.
However, in SF4, some characters are practically unplayable if you can't do their tight links in frametrap pressure confirm situations. This causes a lot of beginner players that don't have a quick knack for tight links OR a teacher to sit in training room practising hard combos all day, without spending any time learning how to actually play, so all that happens is that you have robots that can do combos but 0 fundamentals. There are a LOT of problems with basing your combos on tight links, when there are more interesting options available that a vast majority of other fighting games have already done to both mitigate the execution grind problem and the boring combo problem, and good design can give good damage to beginners and great damage to experts.