jaycr

Solved!

Thanks to @tison_ (whose comments have been removed by mods). @tison_ discovered that this was related to the way Elementor was rendering shortcodes, and solved it by editing in Elementor and clearing caches.

In my case, it was because I had put shortcodes in a textbox widget, instead of using Elementor’s shortcode widget. This was adding the <br> tags to links.

Earlier, I determined that Yoast was involved, by deactivating plugins one by one. Today though, it didn’t make a difference. I don’t know what happened, but it seems that Yoast is not the problem after all, it’s Elementor.

I hope this helps others.