As an editor, this is what I try to stress to writers. Links as citations are fine and desirable for maintaining your credibility. If you're going to cite some data or quote someone, it's good practice to provide a link so people can verify you're telling the truth. This is especially helpful in an environment like Medium where editors often don't thoroughly fact check articles. (For example, when I write for mainstream LGBTQ publications outside of Medium, my editors often remove my links. The publication itself is responsible for my credibility, which their readers understand implicitly.)

But what isn't helpful and desirable is when it's necessary to click on citations to understand what the writer is talking about. An article should be self-contained, in my opinion. A reader should be able to understand it on its own without having to click on anything.

Sometimes when I'm reading an article that would otherwise interest me, but then I get link after link I would have to click to truly comprehend what the writer was getting at ... I can feel pretty frustrated, and I often just back out and don't finish the article.

This is something a lot of writers could pay a little better attention to, I think.