I don't know if it really factored into rustdoc's design since it was already built when I came to Rust, but when I was part of the team responsible for rustdoc, I did object to suggestions we do this on that basis.
As well as, extending the underlying language (that is, markdown) has to be done really carefully, and so being conservative with how it's done matters. This was a huge part of figuring out the design of intra-doc links in the first place.
(All of this great work is being done by others, and I don't know what their opinion on it really is, so my opinion being -1 doesn't really matter these days.)