Mobile browsers frequently come with gestures that can effectively override any attempts to scroll horizontally, instead taking the user backwards/forwards in browsing history, for example.
This is certainly true of Safari, the default web browser for iOS, to the point where even trying to cycle through a horizontal slideshow of images can bait the user into accidentally going back to the previous page.
Not only that, but on iOS I believe it was/is possible to cycle between open apps with a very similar gesture as going back/forth in browser history -- this already proved pretty dumb for browser usability and would prove worse still for horizontal scrolling elements on websites.
Personally, I like to operate my mobile device one-handed a lot of the time, and at the very least I'm not scrolling websites or switching back/forward with both hands even if I'm holding the device with both hands.
So the last thing I want to do, especially if I'm carrying something in one hand, is to have to try and stretch my thumb to the far side of the phone to scroll through a horizontal menu.
My other argument against this sausage menu idea, which has been around far longer than the date of the linked article, is that on many viewport sizes your links may not be half-occluded by the edge of the screen. Given that mobile browsers tend to hide their scrollbars, since without a cursor the scrollbar is just a progress indicator w.r.t. how far down the page you are.
Thus, on some screen sizes -- and it isn't difficult to encounter, given how many different devices there are out there -- n links will be visible in full before the edge of the screen, and then there may not necessarily be any visual hint that there are more menu items to scroll to. So you don't discover that there are more menu items until you accidentally scroll that region.
Finally, I would argue that even for the technophile the hamburger menu is preferable at this point, simply because they have been conditioned by a good decade's worth of responsive web design UX. The sausage menu, being often an edge case, is less obvious even to the technophile purely because not many sites elected to do it that way.
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It seems to me that the superior alternative to both hamburger and sausage menus would be to adopt the hamburger menu style, but simply replace ≡ or the menu icon with the word "Menu"
The hamburger style can be done without JS too. If you really want to avoid JS, just use :target selector or other CSS shenanigans.
And one advantage of short or medium length sausage menus on PCs is that they probably don't require any scrolling.
In my opinion, that's what's so nice about them; natural to scroll on mobile, and probably not requiring any scrolling on PCs.
If the items don't entirely fit on most PC screens, then I would take that as a hint that there's too many items for a sausage menu to be a good solution. (subsequently reaching for hamburgers, reducing the number of items, or exploring other options... eg. a sausage menu could also be more than one line?)
I'm curious about why horizontal scrolling feels so bad.
Like it works just fine in mapping apps, which naturally align to a 2d canvas, but why does it feel so lousy to use with almost any other form of information?
Is it because we write left-to-right, top-to-bottom? So text chunks fit better with no horizontal scrolling? (I think this is also why vertical tabs are so much better than horizontal tabs).
Next time you use a mapping app and scroll with your fingers or thumb, pay close attention to the direction: Most likely you're actually dragging it slightly diagonally then adjusting vertically afterwards.
I think a large part of it is that horizontal navigation as in OP is too thin, so if you do these natural dragging shapes your finger leaves the scrollable area. It may still work fine, but it feels wrong. Vertical scrolling on the other hand, because of what you say with our writing style, has a much larger grab area so we can easily stay within the box.
There's also parts specific to it being a menu: A vertically-aligned one usually has empty space on the right because the menu items probably aren't the same length, giving you a nice "grab area" (either your finger with touch or a place to put the mouse pointer for a scrollwheel) that doesn't hide anything. Plus scanning down a list is easier than sideways anyway because every item starts at the same place; just imagine how annoying it is to read a bulleted list on here when someone accidentally puts it all on one line because they didn't add an extra blank line between bullets.
Intuitively, it might be because the mouse predates the touchpad, and most mice only have vertical scroll wheels (so it conditions users to avoid discovering horizontal scrolling as an option, unless you click and drag a horizontal scroll bar).
Currently, it's also rare for webpages to feature horizontal scrolling, so by habit most users scroll vertically to access new information.
Discovery is also another reason mentioned by users elsewhere in these comments. Since horizontal scrolling is a rare behaviour, a clear signifier [0] is needed to quickly communicate that horizontal scrolling is a possibility, which is an extra problem that other potential methods don't have.
what we need are literal site maps with (lat, lon) defined for each link, so users can scroll around a fun treasure map to find what they're looking for
