I've never used that link modal, so it's not a big concern of mine. If I want to put a title attribute in my link, I simply type it out. It's much faster.

Most of the arguments I see against using the title attribute are not because it's bad to do so. Rather, the arguments are because the title attribute isn't helpful to people using screen readers and people on mobile devices. Even Peter's article linked above is the same. So, if the title attribute isn't read/seen by certain groups of people, that doesn't necessarily make it bad. It just makes it useless. And, people who are stuck in a habit of using them but being told they're useless doesn't do much to motivate them to change.

What we really needed was an argument for why they're actually bad or harmful to get users away from using them. I bet if you wrote a post called "Title Attribute Bad For SEO", folks would drop them like a bad habit.