This discussion went emotional and a liitle off the merit. The facts are:
Publisher is much too good to be used only for stunning commercial /artistic flyers or brochures.
Any book or publication, just above the aforementioned type, must have a functionality of internal referencing to the text ( footnotes or endnotes are examples of).
Those users, who seem to be surprised by the lack of this functionality are, in my opinion, the within the core of the Affinity applications. People of science, applied art etc.
So it is not a matter of "if" but of "when" or "how". Maybe a temporary workaround using a "branch link" to a text frame located at the footer combined with index finction would be possible ?