Despite Mastodon having real quote posting now, I still see a lot of folks just posting links to toots.

Please, start using real quotes.

I'm guessing the reason lots of folks are still just pasting links is that some instances running modified software started displaying those as quotes already before Mastodon got quotes. But well-behaved fedi software doesn't do that, because it bypasses notification and consent of the quoted post author. So when you do that, the rest of us are left with the bad old UX of having to copy-and-paste the URL to the search box to actually see what you were trying to quote.