Hi @joepowers16,
Not a direct answer to your specific question but you could be interesting in the new visual markdown editor included in RStudio 1.4 (currently in Preview)
Only the text of the link would be shown.
I would be interested to know if you find it useful for your usage! Hope so.
Regarding coding solution, that is hack-ish but you could rely on R with the Rmd format compare to only md format. Custom solution that you may found (or not) useful
---
title: 'insert link helper'
output: html_document
---
```{r links-db, include = FALSE}
md_link <- function(text, link) {
sprintf("[%s](%s)", text, link)
}
links <- c("https://here.is.my.superlong.link/G01HPJFLS1W/p1608076284001900",
"https://here.is.my.other.superlong.link/G01HPJFLS1W/p1608076284001900")
```
See `r md_link("text", links[1])`