Oh, oops! I misread your question. The approach I suggested only works with internal links. Sorry about that.
However, when I tried your example with graph vs. flowchart, both external links “A” work for me. I’m running Obsidian v0.12.13 on Linux. The only difference I can see is that I included semicolons at the end ofeach line.
So they are definitely being rendered differently to HTML.
And I see now that while both are clickable, only the flowchart one will actually open a new browser window. (Clearly I need to drink my coffee before jumping into technical discussions. )
I don’t know if this is a Mermaid issue or an Obsidian issue. I think we’ll have to defer to the devs.