Wordpress Bleg

I semi-broke (for my purposes -- the site users probably won't even notice) Rational Review News Digest this morning, and hopefully someone can tell me how to fix it.

The problem:

I need our posts to show URLs, not destination page titles, in links. The reason I need that is that I paste page content into a text editor for the email editions.

I had that working -- presumably through a plug-in called "Disable Embeds" -- until yesterday.

But for some reason, "Disable Embeds" didn't disable one kind of embed -- specifically, YouTube video links.

I tried to fix that with a different plug-in.

Not only did it not work, but it undid whatever functionality "Disable Embeds" had for stopping Wordpress from displaying links instead of page titles (even after I ditched the new plug-in and re-enabled "Disable Embeds."

I also tried some functions.php code that was supposed to fix the problem. It didn't.

So instead of what I want, which is:

Attention! Deficit Disorder
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp

“On March 28, US president Joe Biden unveiled his 2023 budget proposal. It totals $5.8 trillion, which would bring federal spending and deficits back below their pandemic-era heights (although not back to 2019 levels). Biden’s ask comes to nearly $18,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Oddly, The Hill reports, the White House’s big brag on the proposal is that it would reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next ten years. Usually when a politician pitches a plan to do something over the course of a decade, I expect a bunch of rosy projections that won’t ever come to pass. It’s easy to make promises now and leave them to another president and other Congresses to keep. This proposal doesn’t even bother with the rosy projections, though. Its tables, which run through 2032, project higher, not lower, deficits.” (04/04/22)

https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/16767

I get:

Attention! Deficit Disorder
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp

“On March 28, US president Joe Biden unveiled his 2023 budget proposal. It totals $5.8 trillion, which would bring federal spending and deficits back below their pandemic-era heights (although not back to 2019 levels). Biden’s ask comes to nearly $18,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Oddly, The Hill reports, the White House’s big brag on the proposal is that it would reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next ten years. Usually when a politician pitches a plan to do something over the course of a decade, I expect a bunch of rosy projections that won’t ever come to pass. It’s easy to make promises now and leave them to another president and other Congresses to keep. This proposal doesn’t even bother with the rosy projections, though. Its tables, which run through 2032, project higher, not lower, deficits.” (04/04/22)

Attention! Deficit Disorder!

Anyone got any ideas, other than maybe giving up on Wordpress and switching to some CMS whose creators don't assume that every user will want every new whiz-bang feature they come up with and make it hard to disable that feature?