I can’t replicate this in v8.9.2. The $Text area content menu has no "Edit Link…"option. Indeed such a menu is not seen anywhere in Tinderbox as far as I can see. Could you post a screen grab of the context in which the menu you describe is appearing?
Links detected in RTF drag/drop or paste are created as ‘Smart URLs’. These links are not Tinderbox native web links! as previously explained in a previous post. They exist only in the $Text RTF layer, un-less manually re-created as native Tinderbox links.