Just re-read this one and I don't think it was ever a core Elementor bug, which is probably why nobody got a proper answer at the time. Everything described (text turning into dots, images and buttons vanishing the moment a link is attached) points to CSS being applied to the
a tag itself, not to the editor.
Two things I'd check first, because they've bitten several sites I've looked at since March last year:
- Site Settings > Global Colors / Typography > Links: if the link colour was ever set to something transparent or the same grey as your background, linked text becomes invisible while unlinked text stays fine. The little dots in Günter's screenshot look a lot like an underline showing through with no visible glyphs.
- Theme or child theme CSS: some themes (and a few "link cloaking" or affiliate plugins) style every a inside content as a block-level button with fixed width, padding, or a font-size of 0 for hover effects. That would explain eironeia's "button block underneath the text" perfectly.
Quickest way to confirm: right-click the broken link on the front end, choose Inspect, and look at the computed styles on the
a element. Whatever is setting
display,
color,
font-size or
width will show its source file next to it.
Question back to anyone still following: were you all on the Hello theme, or something else? And did the problem survive switching to Hello temporarily with Elementor's CSS regenerated under Tools > Regenerate CSS & Data? If it disappears on Hello, the theme is the culprit and it's a five-minute fix in Additional CSS rather than anything Elementor needs to patch.
