Some additional observations: I just changed the ownership of that table-of-content post I mentioned earlier and the effect was that all (both internal and external) links had their counters reset to 0; all but the first link in the post (which is an external link).
So there is definitely some huge incoherent behaviour here.
But apart from that it would be more coherent if all counters were reset (or only internal ones or only external ones), I’m wondering whether a change of post ownership should/needs to reset any counter at all? After all, information is being destroyed here.
My proposal would be that neither rebaking nor change of ownership should reset counters.