Two or three ideas that aren’t specifically about “graph-view,” but are about your larger question (showing the direction or relationship between notes or between chunks of content):
One way to do this without Graph View is by writing your links in your notes in a “breadcrumb” manner.
For example, in a note called Parent Note, you could write something like:
Parent Note > [[Child Note]]
and in the note called Child Note you could write something like
[[Parent Note]] < Child Note
In this way the relationship is obvious.
A couple of other options come to mind, but related to content within a note: