There are many, perfectly valid non-marketing use cases for link shorteners. We send SMS's to people with a link in them. We shorten them so SMS is less annoying to read. Also, we print links in terminal sessions, same thing.
Who with a sane mind would click on a link sent by SMS?
When it comes from a vendor you signed up for and you configured the service to send you SMS's on certain events. For us that is when a site or app goes down. Think Pagerduty without the pager.