I vaguely remember doing this with attributed text for iOS 4.

That said, I also had quite a lot of success on iOS 4 using HTML as the layout engine for the main screen of the app, though the place ran out of money before that went anywhere.

HTML can be really good, the blockers back then were it not being exactly the same as the Apple UI guidelines unless you put in a huge amount of extra work that nobody wanted to spend. I'm not sure when Apple's own guidelines stopped mattering exactly (iOS 7's invisible buttons necessarily had to be ignored, but there was already a decent level of custom UI before them and it was already essentially irrelevant even before Apple became extra-inconsistent with Liquid Glass), but I think we're now at the point where you only follow those guidelines if you (a) don't have your own UI team, and/or (b) want to try to aim for a shout-out from Apple.

Do not know about "forever", at the moment it works okay, I guess. But for a long long time most of the iOS apps were using this https://github.com/TTTAttributedLabel/TTTAttributedLabel to have proper support for links & other basic attributes.