I knew it would take a few bare minutes before someone would come to make that distinction about how Google search links work.

Then I would have to say "okay copy the domain and path from your search result, which isn't a link, and which Google probably hides already (so this new advice won't work any more) or they will hide it some day, so the system doesn't work as literally as I described it."

So if Google has found more and more ways to avoid people avoiding their tracking, that's fine, and what I said literally doesn't apply if you take it 100% literally, but at least you understand what I'm saying about how to avoid the naive copy paste surprise.

The onclick attribute of the search result does it, that may have something to do with that.

It does happen on Android. So apparently they treat onclick differently.

There are extensions to fix this