I don’t think </a href> has ever been proper closing syntax for a link, so as long as you use the correct HTML for that and images there shouldn’t be any problems going forward.
HTML image code: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp (see sidebar for more)
HTML on iNaturalist: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/useful-html-tags-for-inaturalist-comments-and-other-text-wiki/6198
Markdown cheatsheet: https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/