No. That's actually the biggest myth about Gemini that seemingly everyone on HN believes.
When talking about this people are usually refering to this section of the spec:
"Clients can present links to users in whatever fashion the client author wishes, however clients MUST NOT automatically make any network connections as part of displaying links whose scheme corresponds to a network protocol (e.g. links beginning with gemini://, gopher://, https://, ftp:// , etc.)."
But that only says that you can't automatically fetch images (or other resources). You can still make a network connection if the clicks on the link, for example.
When talking about this people are usually refering to this section of the spec: "Clients can present links to users in whatever fashion the client author wishes, however clients MUST NOT automatically make any network connections as part of displaying links whose scheme corresponds to a network protocol (e.g. links beginning with gemini://, gopher://, https://, ftp:// , etc.)."
But that only says that you can't automatically fetch images (or other resources). You can still make a network connection if the clicks on the link, for example.