Okay, so… I have installed Spacemacs, and confirm that the issue can be reproduced.
I seem to be able to fix it by doing this in dotspacemacs/user-config part of the .spacemacs file.
I had to add the first part to get rid of an Evil issue (evil-redirect-digit-argument)
I don’t have to refresh the org-roam-buffer and get the correct display order in the first instance. I can press the Return key on a backlink to navigate as I expect.
I am not used to Spacemacs and it’s hard for me to use it; I can only hope what I did is correct for Spacemacs.