I'm on Android and honestly love how it looks, but you can blue-ify your links and change the line spacing if you want. Settings > Appearance > Custom CSS and you can do anything your heart desires.
You're treating Mastodon as the protocol here, and sure it's a combined frontend/backend, and it is the most used one, but its just one implementation of the AP protocol. You can plug your favourite AP app/frontend into any Mastodon instance.
I think they're saying that frontier LLMs may be usable to spot citations that are correct by shape (a real citation) but incorrect by usage (unrelated to the text)
I kind of hate the idea, but you probably could do a lazy LLM check of every paper and every citation and have it flag possible wrong (second sense) citations for human review
But you'd need a LOT of tokens and a LOT of human-hours
1Password has really been bugging me recently, all the emails they send have giant link buttons they want you to click without verifying where you're actually going