iOS 10.0.1 was the first public release of iOS 10; iOS 10.0.2 was a patch released a couple weeks afterwards fixing some bugs with Photos, app extensions, and the lightning 3.5mm adapter. (10.0 was not released to the public in any form-- probably some critical issue was discovered late in testing after 10.0 had been tagged internally but before the GM seed of 10.0.1 was released to developers.)

This sort of change (fixing link previews) is similar in scope to changes Apple's made in micro (0.0.1) releases before. Whether it happens in a micro release or wait until 10.1 (or even change anything at all) really depends on how important Apple thinks the issue is.

At any rate, I doubt the feature is going away completely (link previews were a flagship iOS 10 feature): at best, I'd expect a "Automatically preview links" checkbox in Settings, just like external image downloads in Mail.