Ever since I figured out that it’s super easy to create links once I’ve created the file (especially using aliases) using the backlinks pane, I’ve tried to avoid creating links to files that don’t exist yet because I’ve discovered that it gets messy if I have [[thing]] and [[things]] (or, say, Egypt and Egyptian) and I have to remember which version I used every time – but if I later create a file Egypt, and alias it to Egyptian, it works fine. But if I accidentally screw up ever and link to Egypt and Egyptian, you can’t merge it later.
These days I only do it if I really need to connect two otherwise unconnected ideas (for example, if Egyptians traded with Ethiopia, who traded with China, and Egypt and China didn’t have any connections between them other than Ethiopia, I might want to create the link to the nonexistent page so that my graph is a little more accurate. But that’s pretty rare.
I used to think I wanted to treat the “dangling links” as a todo list, but realistically, I like creating the note when I need it and not before, so I’ve changed my mind on that front.
Hope this helps
and always remember there’s no one true way