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On the other hand, link shorteners are also great for hiding malicious links because you can't see where it's going before you click on it.

Just a note:

On bitly, you can add a + to the end, to get to the stats page for that link; it also gives the destination.

On the goo.gl links, add .info to the end.

This is the theory, but I've never seen it in action. Even those cryptocurrency scam bots that reply to high profile accounts with wallet stealing sites have their links working for hours / days.

I saw some links being pulled already, but I won't click the crypto scams to see if they were or not.

You don't need to do a giant grep. You could put all links in a database, which contains pointers to where the links are used. Then if you want to delete a link, you can delete all those places.

This seems equal or less effort than making a url shortener.