It makes sense though, I believe. If you link to the home page of a website, what would that mean if you consider it a vote: "I endorse this precise document",

It makes sense though, I believe. If you link to the home page of a website, what would that mean if you consider it a vote: "I endorse this precise document", or "I endorse what's on that website"? It would make sense to lessen the endorsement if you link to individual pages only, but not the home page / hub pages. SEOs have, of course, gone to extreme lengths with that by doing "pagerank sculpting", i.e. making sure you mostly link to the pages you want to rank well with, and not your privacy policy. From my experience, they've stopped being overly sensitive about that now ("it has to look natural"), and it's just about raw power: who can buy the best expired domain (state entities being dumb and just letting their domains expired when they rename...), or who can rent a folder (and the links that come with it) on the strongest media platform. It's a cat-and-mouse game, and google seems to not want to be a cat unless they can be a perfectly automated cat, and they can't.