Do people find this graph view useful ? I have never seen the practical usefulness of this. I usually just click through the links or use search to navigate to what I need.

I've been using org-roam for my research for a couple of months now, which has a lot of overlap.

The org-roam-server visualisation are really useful for me, since it makes it easier to see what areas have sparsity in them and should be expanded upon. Plus it gives me something more tangible to look at to understand how my research is expanding, there's a bigger sense of "building something". https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server

Ok, I guess the difference here is that my note-taking is write-heavy and I go read/lookup something only when I have a real use case for it - which is different from traditional research, which is the primary focus of these tools.

Have you tried obsidian? It seems to address some points that you are looking for (graph, linked notes, etc).