The problem with links comes from past situations with Blizzard forums.
Years ago all Blizzard forums allowed links, however phishing site scams and other not friendly sites became more and more common both from said scammers and bots and for every one person who checks a link first there is a bunch who don’t, hence Blizzard ended up disabling all links.
They then fixed it so you could post links but not hyperlinks, so you’d have to copy and paste a link if you wanted to go there (bar Blizzard sites), this at least had people check a link abit closer (again this was years ago, before Overwatch even existed).
Now we have new forums and with everything new there is teething issues, the problem is people think the new forums where a ‘turn on and forget about it’ thing, when really there are updates and code changes happening behind the scenes already.
It’s been flat out said by Blizzard that hyperlinking/embedding images/gifs etc is part of the Trust Levels system the forum has in place.
People have found ways around things which are bugs being fixed, the </> method hasn’t been confirmed to be a bug or not as of yet but I know linking to Blizzard sites should come back at some point.
Basically it’s a constant work in progress not a finished product they simply forget about, for normal linking we may see some trusted sites return to normal uses sometime (ie Blizzard sites) but hyperlinks and even more so picture embedding/gifs will stay behind the trust levels because of how easily they can be exploited/spammed if they were given to all users.