In the settings section of Find orphaned files and broken links you’ve got the possibility to exclude both links, files and folders, so you could just add your journals folder to the directories to be excluded, and that would most likely do it.
You’ve also got the option to exclude files tagged with something special, so you could add like a “non-orphan” or similar to files which turns up in your vault, but which you don’t consider to be a non-orphan.
From with Templater you could trigger a Dataview query and use the dv.markdownTable, dv.markdownList and dv.markdownTaskList to generate markdown to be added to the template. Various examples have been given in this forum during the last year.
And if you do a more specific query to just get a number or some text, you could also just append it to the tR variable, or assign it to another variable which you could then re-use later on in your template.