In reply to Zach Jenkins.

Let me add with more use of the new inline link editor that many times the editor will not dismiss, so if I don't want the editor in place because it covers something, it will not disappear even if I click another link.

If it's blank by the time I go to the link editor it will put a _wp_link_placeholder as html even if it's just to then try to dismiss the link editor.

Again I don't know what kind of testing was done on this and what use cases (and I don't have a site that I can run betas on so testing wasn't an option) but this seems flawed at best.