Modern Communication sites - display links issue

Perhaps I wasn't clear and I apologize if so.  

Yes, it is looking like the modern web parts are in fact missing code and functionality. That is the reason I think this is a bug or missing feature in the current release.   You are right and the native experience directly in a document library will work fine and process the request for the .url object as a redirect.  But, when you use the out of the box delivered web parts to display the contents of that library on a page, the experience is broken as the browser attempts to download the url items, rather than processing them as actual web links.

We've opened  a case with Microsoft, so we'll see what they say.  I'll share what I can when I learn more.

We would love to use a solution that does not force us to use .url files, but that is the delivered functionality from SharePoint.  SharePoint is transforming all web links in document libraries to .url items.  So, in a standard document library, you click on Add and choose "link", you get a short form where you paste in a URL and give it a title.  If you paste in anything (such as https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/hr or even http://www.bing.com), it automatically appends .url on the end and transforms it into that kind of object.  That might be part of the issue and where code is missing or wrong (or intentionally doing it for an unknown reason).  Perhaps a solution would be to add a content type (hopefully delivered by Microsoft soon) that will not do the .url transformation and will allow for native treatment of a standard web link.

So, hopefully that is a bit more clear. I wouldn't think that having a list of links on a page and making sure that they actually act as expected when you click on them isn't an unusual request. We need more than what the Quick Links web part provides because we have a large number of centrally managed links that will be secured (or at least audience targeted). We are trying to provide a premier experience to a wide variety of users. Each user would only see the much smaller subset of links that they need.  When that large diverse audience comes to this communications site (a publishing layer of our intranet), we want to guide them quickly to the deeper structures and to other systems as needed. Surely we are not the only customer that has this need.