The non-editable card links are discussed a bit here, but to expand on that: we have had many people tell us in the past that they don’t really care about the aliasing ability of card links and care more about card link names being automatically updated when the linked-to card’s name is updated. So this was a bit of an A/B test to see what people actually think when that is the only option. So far the feedback (including yours here) has been “I still want aliasing”, so as @tobias said in the other thread we will be improving and homogenizing this in the near future.
And yep, those are reasonable points about the current behavior of the UC in light of these changes. We will improve that as well.