Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
I'd look up the concept of Link Juice / Link Equity. Loads of links won't harm a site, but you want to signify which pages are the most important, and too many links on a page (particularly the homepage) can reduce how much PageRank inner pages end up getting. A well designed navigation should more-or-less achieve this by default, with top level links being more important than secondary, with the least important tertiary links often only linked to from a few secondary pages. Ultimately, though, a bad navigation will kill your CRO, so put users first here. Link Equity is an interesting concept (and a major one when it comes to understanding how links and SEO work), but not worth harming...
Full answer by RichardB: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/148803 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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