[gwern]

WP style hover footnotes are fine because they are invariably mere bibliographic metadata. (This is also the case for OP, where every sidenote/footnote could, and should, just be a hyperlink.) You know what they are without hovering, because they are just a simple citation and you have zero interest in them unless you are factchecking or following up references. The fact that the footnote is an opaque link, a blackbox, is not an issue when you know what will be inside the blackbox & if it's worth the effort to you - you either want the citation or don't.

However, most of the interesting uses of footnotes people talk about, like nested stories, are not like this. Novels like _House of Leaves_ or _Infinite Jest_ for example. But these are fine also, because you can just assume you want to read the footnote and follow the reference. It just makes reading it more nonlinear and like a CYOA.

However, in between, there is no golden mean. It is very frustrating to have a book where half the footnotes are mere bibliographic information but the other half are interesting comments, digressions, meta-commentary, and so on. You either spend a lot of effort breaking from the text with wasted clicks/context-switches, or you miss a lot of important things. This is bad enough when it's a book using footnotes and you only have to keep glancing down at the bottom to see what it is - but it gets far worse with endnotes, and if they require multiple clicks each, you just give up!