As I understand when this forum was new it was used a lot to shill bitcointalk activities here and just steal the traffic and in this situation restrict bitcointalk links is understandable, but yes, the times are changing.
In my opinion it won't hurt the altcoinstalks to allow here links to other platforms, in general all of us are acknowledged about these platforms anyway, I even posted thread about altcoinstalks rank teleportation on bitcointalk.
It is totally up to the forum admin to decide what is allowed here, but probably it can be considered at least to review the situation again and possibly make changes in positive way.
I think someone will start to redirect traffic to other platforms again, but maybe this can be handled manually instead of the current automatic system.
There is also a rule about hashtags, which is too strict in my opinion since I personally faced a problem that I can't post required hashtags in the bounty thread, since there are too many of them.
In general it is good for the altcoinstalks to force you to create threads here since you can't put bitcointalk links (totally understandable), but sometimes you need to post some link just for evidence, etc. and you can't.