Does the SEO of links with href="#" on the page affect?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Good afternoon. We have links on the page with href="#". They are needed for the correct operation of the photo scroller. I received a recommendation from an SEO specialist to get rid of them. How justified is this advice? In fact, they are only needed so that when you hover over an element, the cursor changes to pointer. The same effect can be achieved through css, but then you have to rewrite a third-party plugin for paging through photos.
So, do links with href="#" somehow affect search engine optimization?

Answer 1

SEO specialists recommend as usual, and cannot explain the reasons for this decision, in terms of meaning, these links do not carry anything and are stupidly ignored by the search engine, just imagine that one of the search engine developers took it into his head to lower the page ranking from the number of empty links, it seems crazy
By the way, it is possible that the plugin adds these links through JS, then they are not visible to the search engine at all, but if they are nevertheless explicitly registered on the server side, then you can rewrite them to span, and before the plugin is initialized through js, replace span with a, but IMHO this is nonsense, development costs for empty profit

Answer 2

Then why do you need an a tag for links? Change it to a span and hang a handler on it