Part of me wants to say, this is waste of space. The "Reimagined Wikipedia" is basically just taking all the links and rendering them as tiny thumbnails orbiting the article. This adds no new information, no new connections, to what was already present in the article.
And yet, it somehow feels different. It's really as you say, "it has the feeling that there is an entire group of people and subjects the care about and rely on the central topic"; those thumbnails beckon, invite you to explore in a way that regular hyperlinks don't.
(That, or maybe after years of getting stuck on Wikipedia, recursively reading linked pages for hours on end, I eventually grew desensitized to regular links.)
And yet, it somehow feels different. It's really as you say, "it has the feeling that there is an entire group of people and subjects the care about and rely on the central topic"; those thumbnails beckon, invite you to explore in a way that regular hyperlinks don't.
(That, or maybe after years of getting stuck on Wikipedia, recursively reading linked pages for hours on end, I eventually grew desensitized to regular links.)