Thank you very much for your passion and feedback, these kinds of posts are incredibly useful to us!
While it’s true that Bear is not going to make backlinks the main feature of the app it had wiki links since day 1, so it’s something we care about.
Our design philosophy with Bear is to provide powerful features without making the UI complex, allowing a simple and smooth UX for those people who don’t care about them. We want the app to be accessible to everyone and we don’t want to overwhelm people the first time they open it.
I can tell you what we have right now for backlinks:
- they are shown inside a tab of the info panel
- title and context (a bit of text before/after the link) are both shown
- we have linked and unlinked references
- we don’t have previews of the full content (and we don’t plan to add it)
We are internally discussing the 4th column, but no promises about that 
Hope this will clear up a bit our stance on backlinks!