When a submission gets held and its page doesn't link back to me, I now have an AI read the page and decide whether it's genuinely a list of other people's websites or just an essay about friendship. If it's clearly not a /friends page, you get told right away instead of waiting on me. Nothing gets saved, so you can fix your page and resubmit immediately.
It only gets to say no, never yes. Anything it thinks is fine still comes to me to look at, because a wrong no just means you email me and I sort it out, while a wrong yes would sit on the homepage with nobody watching. It also has to actually be able to read your page. If your /friends page builds itself with JavaScript, my crawler sees an empty page, and "I can't read this" is not the same as "this is bad". Those still come to me.
If your page links back to me, none of this runs at all. You've already told me what the page is.