> It turns out that David Bowie is only linked on Caruso's page because they both won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, of which all of the recipients ever are linked to at the bottom of the page.

Sounds like a perfectly good connection to me, but "exclude categories" could still be a neat feature for exploring more indirect linkage. Not sure it would help in this case though -- is that actually a category page?

> is that actually a category page?

What the parent commenter is referring to is actually called a Navbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Navigation_template). Like @chatmasta, I think it would be interesting to label those types of links distinctly and allow excluding them.

Or perhaps alternatively, exclude the contents of those navigation templates, but allow using them as an additional node: David_Bowie -> Template:Grammy_Lifetime_Achievement_Award -> Enrico_Caruso. (In this case, that is redundant with the main non-template Grammy_Lifetime_Achievement_Award page.)