Chrome 57.0.2987.21 (Linux Beta) and 58.0.3001.0 (Mac Canary) are both correct. The link can be clicked, the absolute elements appear above the sticky and below the header, which I believe is the right place. Firefox does roughly what we do (the font is larger so the absolutes are a bit lower) while Safari puts the absolutes most of the way down the page.

It may be this issue exists in M56. Test team, please confirm. If the issue exists in M56, could you please bisect to identify when it was fixed.

****Bulk Edit****

Setting as P1 for test team to prioritize in triaging.

Unable to reproduce the issue on Mac-10.12.2,Windows-7 and Linux Ubuntu-14.04 using chrome stable version 56.0.2924.87 and canary 58.0.3007.0 with below steps
1.Opened chrome
2.Navigated to https://jsfiddle.net/8vhvdkf4/8/
3.Clicked "Click me!" button
4.clicked on anchor "link"

Observed that the Links are clickable and Absolute positioned elements rendered correctly.
Same behavior observed in other browser too(Firefox).

Please find the attached screencast and let us know if anything missed here to reproduce the issue.

Thanks..

Deleted: 689774.mov 2.8 MB

689774.mov 2.8 MB Download

You did everything right.
It's Mac specific. Windows and linux versions are not affected. Chrome 58 canary works as expected. But please check out my video. I've got same behavior in mac os x 10.12.3 (16D32) in late 13 and late 16 mac book pro

Deleted: late16MacPro.mov 4.6 MB

late16MacPro.mov 4.6 MB Download

Chrome 57 on my MacBook Pro circa 2012 (wow, it's that old!) behaves fine. Looking at your video, DevTools believes the absolute positioned elements are in the right place, it's the painting or, more likely, compositing that is broken.

We sometimes see problems with compositing depending on Mac system scrollbar settings. It's highly unlikely, but maybe that explains reproducibility. Could you try changing those settings?

And could you go to chrome://gpu and paste the output here. It might be a GPU or driver issue.

The reality is that we will not do anything about a bug like this that manifests in M56 but not M57, and only on certain hardware. The risk of destabilizing the stable release is not worth the benefit of a fix.

I've changed my system scrollbar settings to always show. If this is exactly what you mean. Nope it does not help.

chrome://gpu output in attachment

>DevTools believes the absolute positioned elements are in the right place
Not only DevTools but also js calculates right positions of sticky and absolute positioned elements. 

Deleted: gpu.txt 7.4 KB

gpu.txt 7.4 KB View Download

Unable to reproduce this issue on Mac OS 10.12.3 using chrome latest stable- 56.0.2924.87 by following steps mentioned in the original comment. Observed the links are clickable as expected.

Adding schenney@ for more updates on this issue.

Thanks!

Given the difficulty of reproducing, and the fact that it does not manifest in subsequent releases, we need to WontFix this. I can understand the annoyance but given the constraints of patching a stable release we will not take action.