The extra click is an inconvenience that they also noted themselves. But it definitely was designed with multilingual use in mind, see here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...
"We are currently considering adding single-click functionality for the most-frequently used languages."
Sadly, while that means that the overall experience will be improved, it will solve exactly nothing for those who are unlucky enough to use a less-frequently-used language.
Alternatively, one could create an account and set a default language, or visit a wikipedia site dedicated to that language.
https://en.wikipedia.org vs https://zh.wikipedia.org for example.
Once you've switched, further links within the site should keep you in that language.
You see something different from this? https://ibb.co/pKbgw6w
Are you logged in, perhaps?
This is the first link: https://paste.pics/dca5897542c8fb939608262307aeafed
Many thanks for the query workaround!