Very pleased to have stumbled across org-roam (https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/introducing_org_roam/).

I think it’ll be the next step I wanted for my personal wiki that I’ve been keeping in org-mode.  I tried org-brain for a bit (again) and it just didn’t click, and also broke my org-publish step.  org-roam just works with straight up org file links, nothin’ fancy needed.

Hoping it’ll get me a bit closer to TiddlyWiki in Emacs kind of thing that I’m after.