Anchor tag scope - URL vs. Expected type

Hi all!

Searched around in all the specs and docs, but apart from
https://schema.org/docs/gs.html#schemaorg_expected haven't found much.

When an HTML anchor tag is used with a property of expected type "text",
like "email" or "telephone", the URL used instead of the actual data
(resulting for example the email property starting with "mailto:", etc.).
What's even more disturbing is that, when this same property added to a
("span") tag inside the anchor tag that have no micro-format attributes
anymore, every linter out there report a new node of undefined type rooted
in the anchor tag, and treats the property as if it belongs to this phantom
node.

Are all the linters misinterpreted the specs (that says nothing about the
scoping of the anchor tags AFAICT), or is the documentation of these
features missing, and the anchor tag should not be used with properties of
expected type "text" unless intentionally overwriting the textual data with
the URL reference?