I coincidentally wrote a post about how I do this: Automated MOCs - My (slightly whimsical) automated-ish setup (I hate how bloated the backlinks function is)
Basically I often have an inkling that a certain topic will eventually become a full-blown MOC, so I have a template for these so-called “proto-MOCs” that will automatically pull related pages out for you. Then you can either choose to incorporate them into your MOC (thereby creating a real connection that will be seen by backlinks and graph view) or you can chose to exclude them with a bit of metadata handling. I think it’s pretty effective at getting the best of both worlds.
But no, dataview can’t replace MOCs.