Please give your links speaking names!

Use the title attribute of links to give them descriptions (or “speaking names”, as you put it). If you do this, it is possible (easy, in fact) to configure a page’s CSS so that the link is displayed normally on the screen (without your long description breaking up the flow of text), but when the link is printed, the full title/description is inserted after the normal link text.

EDIT: I don’t know how to do this with LW’s draft.js editor, but in Markdown you do the following:

[link text](http://link_url.whatever.stuff "Link title attribute")

(In other words, put a space after the end of the URL, then the description in double quotes.)

a[href^="http://"]:after{
    content: " (" attr(title) ") ";
}

.body-text a::after {
    content: " (" attr(title) ") ";
}

Other reasons to do it include accessibility and letting people know whether they've already read the linked article without having to hover over the link to view its URL. However I sometimes still don't do it because of the costs, such as breaking up the flow of the text, making a comment seem more formal than I prefer, and just the effort of typing or copy/pasting the article title (especially on mobile).

I prefer oppositely, to not break the flow of reading. Not to have a hypothetical vocalization of the text switch its moment-to-moment purpose to being a bibliography, let me compress to, "the author linked an article they claimed said shrimping was a fundamental drill for grappling", and move on. Often, I'd even prefer to leave out the "according to this article", and make the statement itself link text.

But there is a tradeoff between different readers. The "bad" version looks better to me for web readers, who are probably the vast majority. Maybe the writer should think about whether it actually is better, on a link-by-link basis, but I think that they will leave it alone. (Writers should also think about phone vs computer, especially if writing is on computer and reading is on phone.)

Here is a compromise: leave the text the same, but also collate a bibliography of works cited. This would provide a new benefit to web readers, while also providing a hint to print readers.

I'm guilty, I'll try to do better :)

The main thing I want to see when a link is given is enough information to decide whether I want to click on it, without clicking on it.

As others have said, one of the downsides of doing this is that adding a readable name interrupts the flow of the text. This is especially a problem if you're skimming the article, because the expanded text will catch your attention even if it's not a central point the article is trying to make. As for printing, I wonder what fraction of people actually do this, to see if the change is justified.