Medium: What Happens to Links?

They’re being massaged in some way. How?

To my friendly neighborhood Medium implementors…

In the help pages, I saw a way to submit feedback, but this is a question.
And I found the link to the Medium blog, but didn’t see a way to send a message there. So I put the question into the “feedback” form. And I’m asking the question here, as well, so others can comment.

My question is in two parts:

1. When I click a link in an article, why does it go through an intermediate Medium page before going to the destination of the link? What is that intermediate page doing? (I’m sure it’s something useful. I’’m curious to know what.)
2. What happens to my Amazon affiliate links when they go through that page? Are they still intact? Does Amazon still see them? Or is Medium adding a tag that causes affiliate revenue to go to Medium, instead?

Here’s hoping for a positive response, and thank you for providing this forum.

Update, 26 Sep 2022

I was contacted by support, and they asked for an example. When I stepped through the process to report what I saw, I no longer saw the intermediate processing page. The Amazon link at the other end was pretty much the way I expected it to look, with the standard Amazon additions and re-arranging, as far as I could tell. So it seems the problem, whatever it was, has gone away.