What are best practices for organizing pages in Main Navigation and Not Linked?

Site URL: https://wscdev.squarespace.com

I'm moving a site from Wordpress with nearly 100 pages. I'd like to have these organized in the Not Linked section in a way that has some semblance of sanity.

Wordpress had parent-pages which lent a nice structure.

SQSP 7 and prior had index pages, but those don't appear to be available anymore.

The best option, I suppose, is Folders. The key problem I have with this is that the Folder itself takes a URL slug. So, for instance, if I want to collect our pages about Research under a folder, the folder would be /research but if I wanted to quickly direct people to an overview page about research, it couldn't be /research.

Do I just name the folder something more arbitrary? Say, /research-folder, since it isn't actually visited by anyone?

And if I want all pages within the folder to have a clear URL, do I manually name each page URL slug, e.g. /research/new-page?

The other option I've seen is using a blank Link item to create a pseudostructure to the Not Linked section, as seen here.