You do realise that those two statements are not incompatible? If they include the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README, they are still including the copyright notice and the rest of the licence.
The MIT licence does NOT say that you MUST have it at the root of your repository in a file called LICENSE. It does not say that you must clearly identify the parts of the code for which you don't own the copyright or anything like this.
You can read it here: https://opensource.org/license/mit