This splits the Markdown rendering and reference extraction phases into
two distinct code bases. The reference extraction phase no longer relies
on the html-pipeline Gem (and any related code) and allows for
extracting of references from multiple HTML nodes in a single pass. This
means that if you want to extract user references from 200 comments you
no longer need to run 200 times N number of queries, instead only a
handful of queries may be needed.
Rails' "url_helpers" method creates an anonymous Module (which a bunch
of methods) on every call. By caching the output of this method in a
dedicated method we can shave off about 10 seconds of loading time for
an issue with around 200 comments.