Nuxt - Google Lighthouse - noopener Breaking Links

I ran Google Lighthouse on a Nuxt site that I built and implemented their performance tuning and accessibility hints and was actually able to get 100% scores across the board (Woohoo!). It wasn’t until the next day that I realized that I had crippled all of the external links that I had on the site opening in a new tab (with target="_blank"). Lighthouse recommends always adding rel="noopener" or rel="noreferrer" to prevent the new website from manipulating the redirect elsewhere. I dutifully searched through all my site files (thanks VSCode) for target="_blank" and replaced it with target="_blank" rel="noopener". It turns out that was the problem and when I went back and did the same operation replacing all the rel="noopener" with rel="noreferrer", everything seems to be working again.