100%. Any link in the body of a post on any social media platform, if they even allow it, will cause it to be excluded from feeds. The post will only show when someone visits your profile directly.

They just realized 10 years ago that allowing people to click off-platform is terrible for engagement numbers, and they realized that they could just prevent it by silently suppressing such content.

this stuff might be cargo cult, but there's also an interaction/engagement signal because you have to expand the comments so the post itself might be higher ranked when they do this