Yes, if a new user weren't paying attention they would be caught up by that a lot.

formatting links with /c/community@instance rather than full URLS works on some platforms, but only if the content linked has been federated, otherwise it is out of sync. You then have to know the link was good, the community exists, then do the copy paste into your search to force it to sync, then the link will work for you...

That could be smoothed out with better fed request optimisation. it's particularly poor on smaller instances that haven't federated with much more than the few big servers, or self hosted instances that have to built that from scratch.