Apple’s universal links “feature” allows a developer to specify that clicking on particular http/https links in Safari will open an associated app (if installed) rather than opening in Safari itself.
If you know that a particular link is configured to open in an app instead of Safari, but you want to open it in Safari on a Mac instead of the app, you generally can work around the “feature” by control-clicking the link and choosing “Open Link in New Tab” or similar.
Unfortunately, if you encounter the link in a different program, like Outlook or Mail, or a PDF document, and Safari is your default browser, the link will open in Safari and then redirect to open in the associated app.
Personally, I almost never want such links to open in an app. I nearly always want them to open in a web browser.
As far as I have been able to determine, there is no way to disable this behavior by setting a preference. Aside from deleting the offending app from my Mac, the closest solution I have found is to block swcd (Shared Web Credentials Daemon) from accessing the Internet via the Little Snitch firewall. (Thanks @mjtsai and Jeff Johnson.)
Does anyone know of a solution for disabling “universal links” on macOS that does not involve using a firewall app like Little Snitch?
(By the way, the same issue occurs on iOS/iPadOS.)