This feature is present in many markdown editing interfaces (GitHub, Slack, this very Discourse, etc.) these days; I've gotten very used to it and it would be great to have it in Joplin as well.
Basically, when you paste a link while text is highlighted, the text is not overwritten with the link, but converted to a link.
In pictures, when pasting in this state (| delimits highlighted text):
Check out |this amazing video| about the topic!
it becomes
Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ about the topic!
but should become
Check out [this amazing video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) about the topic!
I'd be interested in contributing a PR for this myself, I'm familiar with TypeScript and React and this seems like a pretty simple feature to implement, but I wanted to check whether there's any chance of such a feature being accepted before starting to work on it.
The only somewhat similar feature request I found was one about automatically ingesting images if a link to an image is pasted.