[tcgarvin]

It hadn't even occurred to me that there were serious academic attempts at visualizations of this sort. In addition to OP, this whole discussion is full of great alternatives to d3-force (my usual go-to). Kudos to all!

[johnsonjo]

Yeah, this suprised me too when I first learned it, but there's a whole research field and plenty of books about Graph Visualization [0].

[0]: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3...