Yep, the “creating links without a name” thing is actually deliberate. You can read more about the purpose for that in this thread, but basically it is for “auto-naming” links. If you leave a card link blank in this way, the link (when displayed) will be auto-updated when you change the card name of the linked-to card.
However, no name appearing in the backlinks drawer is certainly an unintended consequence of this behavior, so we will try to fix this. Although I can say in advance I’m not entirely sure how possible that will be, because our search-highlighting system and the auto-naming system were not built with each other in mind.