When supporting links the idea is to link to the community-created contents when contents are available in the target language, and to a machine translation when the contents are not available. Unlike other translation services such as Google Translate, which always link to machine translated versions of the content (hiding the community. work) we may want to give priority to community-created content instread.
In the long term we may want to anticipate whether the destination is a community-created article or an MT version as captured in T359824: MinT MVP: Link preview. More short-term solutions could be to skip links to missing content to avoid showing them as links (or showing them in red, where we could incentivize the creation of the local articles missing).
Links to pages that exist on the target language Links to pages that don't exist on the target language
Patch 1122966 in T376862 implements a fix to prevent showing unadapted links then viewing MT content in Special:AutomaticTranslation by removing link text decoration.
This ticket proposes exploring the use of Preview as an entrypoint into Unified Dashboard.