OpenAlex sounds really interesting! It would be fantastic if someone could develop a UI for viewing the local graph of an area of research (say, starting from a particular paper, and traversing the citations back and forward to build it the local network). Seems like it would be a very useful way to discover subareas, get good coverage on literature reviews, etc.
Yeah it seems like a leap :). I love semantic scholar, I like the tldr feature, and I was confused when I read it was commercial. Still an interesting article!