Obsidian does have that feature, so at least one of those options should work. For me, the best thing about roam is the outline level block references. Having to create a bunch of new atomic notes can start to make things really confusing from an organizational perspective and that is what always bogged me down previously. I can use Roam more like a bullet journal, just open up today's note, throw a header down for whatever meeting I am in and start to capture, then click on the header to get all the previous notes I have taken on that subject.
Note that I am not a researcher, but a dev manager, so most of my note-taking revolves around meeting notes and action items with some research thrown in.
Org-roam supports unlinked references. In any case, that's super easy to implement (it's just plain search for the current document title in all other titles) and I expect others to soon offer this feature.