This would work in a certain radius even when hovering in the empty space between nodes, and would make navigation easier as there would be no need to hover directly over a node (which is quite tedious if you need to do it a lot) or to zoom in really close, losing sight of the overall structure of the graph.
Having the note names fade out around the edges would be nice too.
The radius of the effect could be based on the size of the window.
On a zoomed out graph, the many now names could get cluttered, so perhaps it could be that this is activated only while “Alt” is held down (for example).
This could also be a plugin, but I’ve put it here as it would be a fairly small addition.