Pat-modal - loadLinksWithinModal not respected with modal

My modal works as expected, but when I click a link it trys to load it within the modal itself. even when I set the target to '_blank' and set the option loadLinksWithinModal to false it still attempts to load the link content in the modal

<div id="modal-alert">
<a href="#modal1" style="display: none" class="plone-btn plone-btn-large plone-btn-primary pat-plone-modal"
                     data-pat-modal="width: 400; loadLinksWithinModal: false;"
                     ></a>
   <div id="modal1" style="display: none">
     <h1>My Modal.</h1>        
        <p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.example.com">My link</a></p>     
   </div>

</div>

While researching this, I found at least one other person having the issue: https://github.com/plone/mockup/issues/806