Resolving the clumsy handling of display text in markdown-based internal links

What I’m trying to do

I have the option for markdown links enabled since I want solid forward compatibility, plus mixing markup flavors for core syntax elements feels fundamentally wrong to the programmer in me. Anyway, when I create links using the built-in link auto-compete mechanism (triggered by typing ‘[[’), I want an easy way to specify the display text that doesn’t involve onerous manual editing of the link. Basically, what’s been talked about in other threads:

These all are asking for the same thing I want, but were dismissed because it would interfere with aliases to nonexistent files. I understand colliding features can be tricky, but this seems like one of those cases where both colliding features are pretty big and need to be reconciled, rather than one of them simply left broken as is the case now.

With wiki links, ‘|’ works (albeit only after pressing tab first, which is directly counter to the help text in the pop-up dialog), but it’s broken for markdown. I haven’t had the need to alias nonexistent files, so I really have no clue what the conflict is, but I assume the oddball behavior of ‘|’ with wiki (as compared to ‘#’ and ‘^’) is for the same reason; can the matter not be resolved the likewise with markdown?

I use display text in my links all the time, so needless to say, the experience around it has my frustration boiling over. It’s like links are first-class citizens in Obsidian only until they aren’t.

As it seems the Obsidian team isn’t interested in addressing these issues, what are others doing? I prefer avoiding plugins when I can for reasons of complication and future maintenance, but I’m open to it if I can cleanly resolve this. However, my plugin surfing to date hasn’t turned up anything that does the trick.

Or if there’s some clean, built-in way that’s been added since the earlier discussions that I’ve managed to totally miss, I’m more than happy to admit my stupidity in return for the solution!

Keyboard Maestro macros to help with creating these links: