Text input with links without using markdown-like conventions?

How to make a usable and understandable solution to provide (non-webmaster) user with the way to input text with one or more hyperlinks in it? Markdown-like solutions, which require the user to follow some syntax like My (text)[https://link.to.some.we/re] with links. are not suitable.

Can there be any elegant way without involving rich text editor?

I know making links is hard to grasp for the users as it's kind of an attribute for a selection of characters. Even with rich text editor it's still not intuitive. Is rich text editor the only way?

So far I came up with some ideas, but all of them are clunky. On of them is to add chunks of text one by one with a possibility to link (or not to link) each chunk. Another idea is to have a separate Link button, which acts on selection, but this is rich-text editor in principle.