One of the reasons why I like Obsidian is because of the development team’s principle that “we want you to own your data”. In order to help the end-user avoid vendor lock-in, ‘extra’ features - no matter how helpful - that add proprietary syntax should be kept to a minimum (and not encouraged).
In order for the markdown used in Obsidian to be ‘as compatible as possible’, the end-user should be able to choose themselves whether they want to have their file paths automatically trimmed, or not.
My own experience, is that if I type “projects/alpha.md
” as a file path, I expect the program to leave it alone, as-is. Auto-shortening my file paths is likely to make it so that the document will work in Obsidian, but not necessarily in other software. Note that the path auto-shortening happens even if use ‘standard’ markdown-style links, rather than WikiLinks - e.g., “[my link](projects/alpha.md)
” gets automatically shortened to “[my link](alpha)
”.