The article does mention this a bit, and (after reading quite a bit of Gemini content) I agree: 'The links are awkwardly placed, and the "placeholder" markers

The article does mention this a bit, and (after reading quite a bit of Gemini content) I agree: 'The links are awkwardly placed, and the "placeholder" markers (such as numbers or brackets) to connect the text to the link below has not gelled to a standard.' It's like hashtags in tweets - it'll eventually become some kind of community ad-hoc standard, that will be inferior to simple inline links. I guess it makes things harder to parse, so understand why they did it - but inline links is HTML's killer feature. The rest is fluff!