Hope I am not too late to chip in a reply -
! In T145604#3290707, @MZMcBride wrote:
How do you explain to users that almost every citation identifier, including DOI, needs extra markup, except ISBN, PMID, and RFC?
Why is an explanation needed? For average users they probably only want to see them linked, and that's it.
Your argument is that nobody will care enough to make links? This seems to point to the questionable value of having the links at all, if nobody is using them or interested in supporting them.
We don't have unlimited manpower. I am from the Japanese Wikipedia, where the user base is broad but the number of people able to (let alone interested to) support is really thin. Simply being "different and inconsistent" (or other technical reasons) is not a valid argument to cut a working feature and increase the already-too-heavy workload. If it is not like MediaWiki will break down tomorrow, can you please revise this decision to drop magic links?
(Adding one footnote: using a bot increases the number of revisions and uses up some manpower so that doesn't change my argument.)