We've released Menu Autopilot, a free and open-source Drupal module that brings hybrid navigation to Drupal: curate your top-level menu by hand and let each item's children build and maintain themselves from published content. It is to navigation what Pathauto is to URL aliases, and it's available now on drupal.org.
Drupal's menus are hand-curated. On a content-heavy or decoupled site, that means editors are forever rebuilding the navigation to mirror the content — and a hand-placed link is easy to point at the wrong URL. The existing "taxonomy menu" modules generate menu items from taxonomy terms; none generate menu items from content nodes under a curated parent with clean, headless-ready URLs.
We hit that gap building the decoupled platform behind wilkesliberty.com — right down to a live bug where a menu link pointed at an editorial route (/node/107/latest) that the front end rendered as a dead URL. Rather than patch one site, we built the fix as a reusable module and gave it back to the community.
entity:node/<id>), so they resolve to your real path alias — never /node/N or an editorial route. It even ships a normalizer to clean up legacy links.menu_link_content links, so GraphQL Compose, JSON:API, or a traditional theme all see the composed tree with no extra work — and the documented front-end pattern is a WCAG 2.1 AA keyboard-navigable Disclosure Navigation.Menu Autopilot runs on Drupal 10.3+ or 11. Install it with Composer:
composer require drupal/menu_autopilotContributions are welcome, and the module is released under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. For the full picture, read the open-source overview Menu Autopilot and the engineering whitepaper Composing Navigation in a Headless CMS.