Every time I make a youtube link it results in a huge unwanted embed that clogs up my post. Is there any way to have the link be clickable but also not embedded?

you could hide it inside a link

Sorry if this sounds dumb but how do I make a link over text?

Like you do on reddit, you put square brackets for the text and then directly followed by regular brackets with the link.

You can see here: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/wrefn the formatting guidelines for everything you can write here.