What turned me off about Joplin was how awkward it was to link to other pages. I might have missed something, but by default I think that takes creating the other page first, then manually copying its id -- way too much clicking, and breaks the focus on what you're writing.

In the end, I ended up using Obsidian (https://obsidian.md). While typing (even in an outside editor), I can just go [[random reference]] -- and that will turn into a link, even if that page doesn't exist yet. When I eventually get to creating the page, it will already have back links from all the places it is used (something else I think Joplin doesn't have).