I think this is a great idea. It would also be nice to have these show up in the quick open panel (with some indication the note would be created).
I think the thing I would like to avoid is creating a link with one name for a topic, and then creating a page for the same topic with a slightly different name (without realizing I had already created links to the topic with the first name).
These do show up in graph view, so I suspect it should be possible to populate them in other places, such as file explorer or the quick open.