Actually now I feel pretty stupid.
So the reason why I pursued your parse-feeds suggestion over the embedded content suggestion was, as I said: for more than a handful of feeds it would always hang somewhere while processing them, and if I put few enough feeds in for it not to crash it would change all the hyperlinks to gibberish local-file links. The problem for both cases seemed to lie with the apparently unnecessary processing that I was hoping to avoid.
But just now, to reply to your question, I made another test feed using the embedded content to try to point out those problems for a specific case, and now I'm not seeing either of those problems. Embedded content now seems to remove hyperlinks entirely (which is ok for me) and does not hang even if I add like 30 feeds.
The charitable explanation is that one of the Calibre updates since March made the improvement. The uncharitable explanation, well, let's leave it unsaid.
Thanks for your help and patience.
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