What was the point of adding the unlinked hyperlink to the index.html.erb file in the views folder?

"Is it correct to say he inserted a broken hyperlink to attempt changing the failure message from rspec?" To my understanding, the answer is "Yes," though I might suggest that the hyperlink is null rather than broken, and I'd make this distinction because, as I understand it, the goal is to test whether or not a link can be clicked, and the second rspec error results from the test not finding the destination link. That means to me that the link is a valid target for the test, even though its ineffectiveness means the test fails in a different way.

"Why didn't he try to find the link to the index.html.erb file directly using the rake routes command..." My grasp on this isn't particularly firm, but I think it's because hardcoding the path would result in the link being available in that one place, that one instance of the hyperlink, and the goal was to create more flexible code that could generate similar links in the future. I think we're supposed to be learning about the relationships between Views and Controllers, but as you're experiencing, that particular course doesn't do a great job of fleshing out the how/what/when/where/why of each piece of code that gets written.

And I think the actionable info from the second test is just "OK, clicking a link works, so now we can work on generating valid links." My impression is that the first two tests are as simple as "can the system find and click a link" and "can the system tell when it has or has not resolved properly on the subsequent page."