"one-way hyperlinks are what make the web possible (this is the concept of "worse is better")"
I disagree; what makes the Web possible is links that are allowed to break, an orthogonal issue to bidirectionality (or indeed to the first class/embedded link dichotomy).
There have been systems which have had first class links (stored and manipulated separately from the documents they link) which have tried to enforce link integrity. Nelson claimed to be able to do it in Xanadu, but was never able to explain exactly how[1]. Hyper-G - the Great White Also-Ran of the hypertext world - tried to enforce link integrity using something that with modern eyes looks rather like a distributed hash table. Interesting, but fundamentally not as scalable as Not Giving A Damn like the Web does. No doubt, if it were reinvented now, it would use something blockchain-shaped.
On the other hand, there have been systems with first class (and bidirectional) links that didn't care about link integrity - Microcosm being one such.
TimBL's decision to have the Web use embedded unidirectional links that would be allowed to break was, in retrospect, a sensible decision - but it's the breaking bit that mattered, not the embedded/unidirectional bit.
[1] source: I directly asked him about this twenty years ago when I was doing my PhD on matters related to distributed hypermedia systems