My issue is remembering that the square brackets come first, not the parentheses. I do like asciidoc's method: https://example.com for bare link, or https://example.com[pretty text] if alternate text is desired

Edit: It took me a re-read to fully understand your comment, I can see how square brackets might be an incremental addition. This may also help remember the syntax, thanks!

That asciidoc format also seems very reasonable.

The big issue isn’t specifically that markdown is wrong or right but that all these different systems are very inconsistent.