Disclaimer: I have never seen the source code for Material for MkDocs Insider (the "Insider"). Anything described in this article is for demonstration purposes only. Use at your own risk.
So how does the [page navigation icons][1] feature look to you? If you find it attractive but can't wait for the $12k funding goal, you can implement this yourself and get it up and running.
Start by grabbing a copy of [material/partials/nav-item.html
][2] from the repository and putting it in overrides/partials/nav-items.html
in your repository. Enable [custom_dir: overrides
][3] as per the docs.