Have you thought of navigation in Confluence can be done this way
As someone who was new to Confluence, it took me sometime to find out how to save my time when searching information in this content jungle.
The search bar in confluence is handy when I know the exact terms for searching. But someone who would like to all kinds of organisers and boxes in my apartment to quickly categorise things and have an organised space, this wasn't the best approach for me. I have used the following tools, and I was finally happy with my orgiansed "Confluenceroom".
In our team, we customised this menu bar to navigate to the frequently used pages, documents and even external links. I have configured this menu in my space which is only visible to me. I like that I can also automate the recently visited pages, which saved me a lot of time.
The other one I am using is to give confluence pages content tabs, when I create long pages of content, I also use the table of content, but I personally prefer to have this tab look and feel, it's as if going through my notebook pages, and I customise the colors, and add emojis.
For more detailed information of how I created both the menus and tabs, you can check out the step by step video I have posted on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv2oT2XMn-s