I think it's so obvious and self-explanatory for everyone that has ever dealt with relational databases.
this is a feature needed for yesterday, it just makes no sense we need to use all those workarounds and automations to get there, and although product is already so advance this is still not available :((
Yeah, it is truly strange that Airtable is the only relational database system I’ve ever heard of that requires relationships (i.e. linked record fields) to be manually set by the user, instead of automatically set by the system itself.
Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that this is going to change, since the entire product hinges around this one (flawed) notion.
The best bet in Airtable, as you already mentioned above, is to just create an automation which is triggered by a formula field getting updated, which then populates the linked record field.
