I would hope that they really didn't move in the direction of having the model memorize image IDs, as that could be easily replaced with an embedding-based image search tool call.

Although, it is possible that it was unintentional as the model was RLHF'ed into memorizing images.

If you train on any form of HTML, or any code that includes URLs, your model is going to learn them somehow.

Stripping URLs would certainly break some code, and also train the model with unhelpful behavior. You want your coding model to write real URLs, not write "return redirect(<|URL_STRIPPED|>)".