If you have Angular 5 or above, just change

<a href="" (click)="passTheSalt()">Click me</a>

into

<a [routerLink]="" (click)="passTheSalt()">Click me</a>

A link will be displayed with a hand icon when hovering over it and clicking it won't trigger any route.

Note: If you want to keep the query parameters, you should set queryParamsHandling option to preserve:

<a [routerLink]=""
   queryParamsHandling="preserve"
   (click)="passTheSalt()">Click me</a>

That will be same, it doesn't have anything related to angular2. It is simple html tag.

Basically a(anchor) tag will be rendered by HTML parser.

Edit

You can disable that href by having javascript:void(0) on it so nothing will happen on it. (But its hack). I know Angular 1 provided this functionality out of the box which isn't seems correct to me now.

<a href="javascript:void(0)" >Test</a>

Plunkr

Other way around could be using, routerLink directive with passing "" value which will eventually generate blank href=""

<a routerLink="" (click)="passTheSalt()">Click me</a>

There are ways of doing it with angular2, but I strongly disagree this is a bug. I'm not familiarized with angular1, but this seems like a really wrong behavior even though as you claim is useful in some cases, but clearly this should not be the default behavior of any framework.

Disagreements aside you can write a simple directive that grabs all your links and check for href's content and if the length of it it's 0 you execute preventDefault(), here's a little example.

@Directive({
  selector : '[href]',
  host : {
    '(click)' : 'preventDefault($event)'
  }
})
class MyInhertLink {
  @Input() href;
  preventDefault(event) {
    if(this.href.length == 0) event.preventDefault();
  }
}

You can make it to work across your application by adding this directive in PLATFORM_DIRECTIVES

bootstrap(App, [provide(PLATFORM_DIRECTIVES, {useValue: MyInhertLink, multi: true})]);

Here's a plnkr with an example working.