I didn’t see this discussion previously, and didn’t find @ebonsignori 's plugin, so I made my own implementation: GitHub - saibotsivad/obsidian-at-people: Obsidian plugin to use the familiar @ notation to cross link to people.
It’s really similar to Evans, you type @ and it suggests names from a specific folder, and you can change a few settings. The Github link shows a bit.
I’m sure it won’t satisfy all the needs in this thread, but it’s been working for me and my workflows reasonably well so far, so… 