I think this is a very reasonable criticism, particularly about words like “piggy”—no doubt typography is *ing hard.
Like is often the case with design, there are trade-offs. In this case I think the readability improvements to links with descenders outweighs the visual cue / scannability of links, particularly because I think links with more-descenders-than-non are not as common.
An interesting experiment might be to try to turn off the effect on words which fail some check (a high percentage of descender glyphs, for example). I created an issue on GitHub [1]—definitely something worth exploring. Thanks!