Hi John, Eric,
Thanks for the replies.
I will try out the highlight-regexp trick today.
The point I was trying to make was not that we should highlight links even in comments (though that was my suggested alternative). The main point I wanted to make was that links should not get hidden in comments.
If highlighting links in comments is not suggested, then at least we should make them visible as,
# some [[link][desc]]
Instead of
# some desc
The use case is where I would have some org-mode text with links temporarily commented out. But in the commented state, I would not know if that text hid any links because the links don't show expanded in the commented text. And also they don't have a different face.
I will update later on what I see on using highlight-regexp. I think that will work for me too.