The story behind the blink tag is so ridiculous.

At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. ... Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/blink_element

While initially popular, became much maligned because of overuse; many people found it annoying. More importantly, it degrades readability and can be particularly problematic for users with visual impairments or cognitive disorders such as epilepsy or ADHD. It can be disorienting or, in the worst cases, even trigger seizures.

tbf it's a valid reason to drop its support

Oh come on. Nobody used it since we have animated gifs as replacement.

Nope. That element never existed. It was text

Besides a selfclosing would make no sense.