@Tacsipacsi this is the first time I'm seeing this case...if/when you encounter this issue on other pages, can you please add links to them on this ticket?

In T287818#7282888, @ppelberg wrote:

@Tacsipacsi this is the first time I'm seeing this case...if/when you encounter this issue on other pages, can you please add links to them on this ticket?

I added one, and will keep an eye out for more. I don’t expect it to be very common, but when it happens, it’s very annoying.

I also fixed some inaccuracies in the description:

• The problem is not that nothing happens when one clicks the [ reply ] link, but that there’s no link to click in the first place.
• The self-links are already rendered as links (at least by the legacy parser) since 9f5309605163: black, bold and unclickable <a> elements. Thus “not be rendered as links” cannot be preserved, but it’s not the goal either, just to keep the actually user-facing behavior. (By the way, this makes engineers’ life easier: simply hrefless links should be treated as the talk page owner’s talk link on user talk pages instead of dropping them.)

In T287818#7283027, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

In T287818#7282888, @ppelberg wrote:

@Tacsipacsi this is the first time I'm seeing this case...if/when you encounter this issue on other pages, can you please add links to them on this ticket?

I added one, and will keep an eye out for more. I don’t expect it to be very common, but when it happens, it’s very annoying.

Understood and thank you, @Tacsipacsi.

I also fixed some inaccuracies in the description:

Oh, wonderful – I value how close attention you pay. Thank you.

Reported again in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wntsr890w1pgnsby

Change 753089 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; author: Esanders):

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Handle selflinks by returning the current page's title

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/753089

Change 753089 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Handle selflinks by returning the current page's title

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/753089

The original page that was mentioned on the task has been archived. So, clicking on the reply links for the talk page owner's comment does not open the Reply tool. But the reply link is appearing now which previously was not.
Also, checked on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Czar, where the reply links are also appearing next to the talk page owner's signature and the Reply tool is opening up when you click on them.

After checking with @matmarex, considering this as fixed.