No, this is simply not true. A pair of integers indexing into a matrix does not require a reference to anything except for one to the container. Hypergraphs are equivalent to bipartite graphs through the incidence matrix construction. Vertices simply do not need to reference one another.

I'm speaking as a seasoned graph theorist who has been using zig and rust for about as long as zig has existed. Your implementation has some nice features but it is far from the only way of doing things.