Weird html escape with invalid link reference

[danielburger1337]

First off, I'm not quite sure what the underlying issue is (and even it is one) and whether this is an upstream issue with the RST-parser or not:

I was looking at the scheb/2fa-bundle documentation to see whether the updated docs are live yet and saw that an added link to packagist.org wasn't correctly displayed. Looking at the html-markup revealed the following (see image):

The RST-source file was missing a space between the link and the text. PR to fix that has been made.

# original
`related packages on Packagist.org<https://packagist.org/packages/scheb/2fa-bundle/dependents>`_.
# fixed 
`related packages on Packagist.org <https://packagist.org/packages/scheb/2fa-bundle/dependents>`_.

Is it intended behavior to be able to embed html elements like that? To me it looks like there is some sort of escaping going on since the slashes have been removed from the html-source and the escaping might have failed?