Speaking personally, I’m fine with a less than perfect backlink system. I’d rather have a backlink feature with imperfect referential integrity than to not have a backlink feature. In my view, broken links should be considered a feature, not a bug, of a distributed thought reference system. For example, if I refer to a private concept in a public graph, I should be able to see it if I have it, but others should only be able to see the reference name if they do not. That broken link would be a privacy feature.
In software and protocols there is a common need to be able to rename things, so luckily Logseq would not be without precedent here.
The infrastructure as code tool terraform has a moved block which lets one declare and apply a new location for an old logical state address.
The HTTP RFC 7231 defines 301 Moved Permanently, 307 Temporary Redirect, 308 Permanent Redirect to address broken links.
The DNS CNAME Records also address changes of referent location.
Whenever I hear about trade-offs I think of this quote from Rich Hickey’s Hammock Driven Development:
So everybody says design is about tradeoffs. Usually when they talk about tradeoffs in their software, they’re talking about the parts of their software that suck. I had to make these tradeoffs. That is not what a tradeoff is, right? You have to look at, at least, two solutions to your problem. At least two, and you have to figure out what’s good and bad about those things before you can say, “I made a tradeoff.”