One solution to this could be:

1. Putting the backlinks next to the page number; while
2. Aggregating references to the same work on different pages under the same citation.

In T287997#7261790, @Jdlrobson wrote:

The hover can be added with one line of CSS. However, it's not for me to say whether it makes sense to include that inside a template...

I'll chip in as an editor fond of using mw-datatable (having only recently heard of its discontinuation):

This very question occurred to me today—as an editor who doesn't own bots (wait till the abotlitionists get here!)—and @Xaosflux was very kind to point me to this ticket. So I'm chiming in.

In T189583#4053095, @matmarex wrote:

So yes, this might require T54180 first.

@Xaosflux suggested I should reignite this suggestion following my question at enwiki's Village Pump:

I see this has been asked several times in the past, but I was wondering whether there's been any progress toward implementing configurable initial table sorts. In the past, one frequent answer to this question has been: ''just save it sorted already''. That obviously doesn't resolve the issue for tables dynamically updated through formulas (e.g. [[List of countries and dependencies by population|population clocks]]) or transclusion from other pages. At the end, what this rigidity ends up promoting are frivolous edits to keep rank tables in the right order. Ideally, one should simply be able to specify in the data-sort-type tag, in addition to the data type, also whether the first sort should be ascending or descending, and whether the table should be pre-sorted by the ascribed column as soon as loaded onto the screen, e.g.:
! data-sort-type="alpha; first: ascending; initial: 3;" | Countries
! data-sort-type="number; first: descending; initial: 1;" | Population
! data-sort-type="date; first: ascending; initial: 2;" | Date