No but they are under-specified. OP is specifically working with a document-hierarchy data-structure with a natural ownership/weak-pointer distinction to exploit -- no need to abstract it to a general graph.
> hopefully design your language semantics to discourage cycles
thus expanding the scope of their comment beyond that specific use case.
So the "increased cognitive overhead" is intrinsic to the problem domain, not an unforced defect of the language design. Overgeneralization in such a case would induce even worse overhead as there'd be no user-level way to fix perf.