Back in the day, before the new Discourse composer, the inserted links were added at the end of the post, not inline (se below).
Wonder if this can be re-enabled in any way, as writing a post with more than a couple of links will make the editing a little nightmareish.
There’s a setting you can toggle for this, display footnotes inline:
Sam has recently turned it off on meta so it should follow that behaviour on here[1][2]
Or do you mean this style[3]
Or do you mean this style[^3]
[^3]: meta.discourse.org
@JammyDodger This is NOT related to footnotes per se, it’s purely for links. I think it’s about Reference-style Links.
Here is a more obvious example that it includes the preview and some explanations. As you can see, the second variant is much easier to read.
I did not know about these. 
This is NOT related to footnotes per se, it’s purely for links. I think it’s about Reference-style Links
Did they used to happen automatically?
Back in the day (like… 4-5 years ago)? Yes, that was the only option to enter links (when clicking on hyperlink icon or pressing ctrl+k). The link is then referenced by its index (but you can enter there whatever you’d want)
If you had multiple links and inserting a new link, the numbering was automagically updated.
Then the new editor came and this feature was gone 
