That's very bad advice that misunderstand the distinction between objects and actions and is completely uninformed by psychologically or marketing insights. It's fine for a semantic Web for robot archivists, but poor for human users.
Care to clarify what you mean by the "distinction between objects and actions"?
If you mean actions within a web application that cause something to happen, then the w3c didn't misunderstand that at all; they simply didn't take it into account because the web at that time didn't have nearly as much of that as it did hyperlinked static content.
Apart from that, the w3c wrote that advice for for people intending to construct a useful hyperlinked web of information, not for people building deliberately manipulative copy. Consider the target audience.
