After the exchange between @NateSilver538 and @nikitabier, I did a little test to check whether that was true and, to my surprise, what I found suggests that link deboosting was indeed reversed. What I did is randomly sample 15 tweets by @nytimes between 2019 and today, compute the weekly average number of likes and retweets they got and plot the results along with a trend line. The idea is that likes and retweets are probably a decent proxy for reach and @nytimes only posts tweets with external links, so by looking at this, we should be able to see any changes in the algorithm with respect to how links are treated. As you can see, it's pretty clear that, starting around the spring/summer of 2023, posts with links started to be penalized and eventually they were completely nuked until the spring/summer of 2025, when a reversal of that policy seems to have started. To be honest, this isn't what I was expecting to find, so even if that's just a quick and dirty test and it's hardly a definitive proof, it's good news and I thought I should share the results.