I'm doing one weird stuff with knowledge graphs in my "real job", and it is sufficiently weird that I am finding that my intuitions about what's going on in the graph are dramatically incorrect, and I don't have any comprehension of how wrong I am until after I select a random collection of nodes, and visualize them somehow. The degree to which this is a pain in the ass compared to using other data structures is wild. You just cannot usefully inspect a graph in text. Are there some tricks of the trade I'm missing, here?

Did you try Moldable Development and in particular customized visualizations?

I haven't, but I'm tied to Python for reasons outside of my control. Do you happen to know if it deals well with Python code? I see there is a lot of WIP on that front in the repo.

Glamorous Toolkit has support for working with Python, if that’s the question

I'm learning that VSCode has an interactive window that is supposed to let you do things like plotlib visualization in place, ala Jupyter... better than nothing, I guess?

I am not sure why people prefer to have as comparison baseline “nothing”, but if that’s the target, I guess it’s better 🙂

We don't "prefer" it. It's just where we're starting from.

Did you consider other alternatives? 🙂

Once, a man got lost driving in Ireland and stopped at the side of the road to ask directions from an elderly farmer. "How do I get to Tipperary?" he asked. Came the reply, "Sure you wouldn't want to be starting from here."

I am familiar with two of your options, Glamorous Toolkit and Jupyter. GLamorous Toolkit is by far the more powerful one, in particular for developing your own views (and other personal tools). Jupyter has the main advantage of being easy to put on the Web, if that's something you need. But if you need more than the already existing widgets, you are in for some major yak shaving.