This topic started me down a path of eliminating excessive links in the Python docs. I started out by writing a linter that could find and correct references that shouldn’t be links. Then I adapted it as a Sphinx extension that unlinks those references during the build without needing to change the .rst source files.
Here’s a PR adding the extension: Docs: use a Sphinx extension to eliminate excessive links by nedbat · Pull Request #145130 · python/cpython · GitHub
There’s a link there to the preview build of the docs with 3612 excessive links removed: https://cpython-previews--145130.org.readthedocs.build/
The extension itself is at GitHub - nedbat/linklint