The YAML can’t be a replacement for link attributes, because link attributes allows you to have different details on different relations, even though they point to the same note. As mentionned in another thread :
Those kind of use cases are mentionned in a lot of different topics now and can’t be constructed any other way : the syntax must support it, the search must support it, the graph must support it, it’s a concept that’s totally missing at the moment and I think is the one that best embodies “link as first citizen” concept while at the moment links are just hyperlinks like you would find on the internet… Worse actually since you can in HTML use attributes on your links.