This can be argued in many ways.
If you think from graphical presentation view, dashed lines can present temporary or transitional state. In this case values, that are modified, are presented with dashed lines as they are manipulated. The geometry path is with normal line to present unchangeable value.
https://understandinggraphics.com/brainy/the-visual-language-of-dashed-lines/
It seems that thereâs the same problem with curve remapping for float values
but as i understood, they are working on an implementation for both cycles and geonode
So i think itâs reasonable to expect that we will have appropriate types also for mixing Vector/Float values.
Speaking about cleanness or aesthetics is difficult. I understand the need to be able to distinguish data flow from field flow.
There might be different ways to achieve it. But the node graph not only needs to be functional, the eyes also need to be able to read the node graph with least efforts. Dashed line pull attention quite strong. An invalid connection could be dashed and easily distinguished from hundreds of other lines without a color.
I believe, our ability to focus is the bottleneck our creativity has to go through.
An artist needs to keep focused to create something. Dashed lines also increase efforts needed to read the node graph. Perhaps, people notice that dashed connection lines have an impact on their ability to keep focused?
I believe, dashed lines might do the job. But there need to be more balancing, testing larger node graphs, and feedback from artists.
Well, there is an implicit conversion going on so I think Mix RGB is fine. Color and Vector are mostly fine when converting between each other, the only problem would just be Vector does not have alpha, but I think this can be overlooked in most cases and it doesnât matter that much.
Int and float would just convert to three identical floats, and will be converted back to the same int or float if it is later plugged to an int or float socket.
I think the only thing that is a bit tricky would be the difference between âColor to Floatâ and âVector to Floatâ. Vector to float would end up having the mean value of XYZ, while Color would take the visual brighness of the RGB into account and will be different form âVector to Floatâ. This only happens when the three channels have different numbers, so if your color/vector was implicitly converted from int or float, you should be fine.
Generally you can just use it without thinking too much, unless you intended to have the vector connect to the float and expect the mean value, with a Mix RGB in bewteen, then you may want to make it a vector first before feeding it to the float socket. But this is kind of rare so most of the time it should be good enough.
Come on. Do you really look at this: â T91563 Function flow visualization
and tell yourself âOh yea, the second one is much better!â ?
Or the one I just posted on twitter to see people thought of it. It is a very simple part of a network, but even this begins to look like traintracks with all the dashes. It almost looked worse with lots of reroutesâŚ
I guess thatâs what you get when someone makes UI decisions that doesnt really care about UI things.
They really need some UI person in charge for things like this and drop the âah well, this will do, who cares, we have more important things to doâ mentality.
I canât give a satisfactory answer to your question, without testing the geometry nodes more in depth. If you had a similar node setup, as this electrical drawing has. would it be easier to intepret if some of the lines were marked differently?
I was always under the impression that Pablo was in charge of the new Geonodes ui look. He had done some nice looking mockups that were often posted on the Blender Today podcast. Not sure what happened with thatâŚ
I wonder too. His mockups looked really nice and clean. He could take up the role, he has a good eye and common sense. Although I understand he is busy with other stuff, community etc
The whole point of a good node based system UI design is that users never ever have to look at things like this. Itâs to have both UI design as well as sufficient toolset for users to encapsulate and abstract parts of their node networks to look clean and readable.
I have programmed whole games with UE4âs node based Blueprint system for example. It requires significantly more complexity than a simply mesh manipulation GN currently offers. Yet, even doing that I never had to deal with the node networks remotely as complex as your screenshot, simply because I utilized all the complexity management tools Blueprint offers correctly.
But even with that being said, I can almost guarantee that if the lines on your diagram were dashes, the readability would be even worse 
You canât possibly draw analogy between physical hardware circuits and virtual nodes. Virtual nodes do not have limitations of physical hardware, and have concepts like instancing same physical objects in their virtual form multiple times, keeping the reference of the physical original. Nor having necessity do deal with physical links overlapping. You canât do that with hardware.
Itâs honestly even ridiculous this needs an explanation, given that we have at least two decades of various node based software evolution which has selected for good ideas and eliminated bad ones. So itâs not like this is something difficult to get right or requiring some significant research. The bar of getting visual style of node based editor right is quite low - just having at least mediocre taste and at least mediocre experience using node based systems.
Whatâs even funnier is that the links from the value node are actually not drawn with the dashed lines, despite the value output does not have any special meaning for the end user, compared to all the other connections displayed there. So that actually acts as a multiplier of the dashed line confusion.
Yeah I remember seeing @pablovazquez mock-up.
It was so cool he is definitely very talented. I was expecting his new node design to be implemented in 3.0 too
So looks like 3.0 nodes wonât look ugly after all:
I just wish we were kept in the loop.
EDIT: Nevermind, dashed lines are still there 
Unfortunately this isnât coming in 3.0, itâs Pabloâs personal build, itâs quite some time that heâs working on a redesign of the nodesâ UI (and general Ui as well), but we started bcon 2 and thereâs not even a task for this, hopefully in 3.1 weâll get it!
I have noticed the output mesh of Realize Instances has all the mesh data accessible stored in Attributes - UV maps, v. groups / colors etc. So hopefully it shouldnât be that big deal to learn the node how to assign them to the mesh appropriately? This would instantly make GNodes usable especially for game artists.
The node works perfectly especially for making a scene with large amount of instances super-smooth (viewport), but we canât use it in itâs current state as without any mapping etc. we canât see the actual result.
I found it a bit⌠surprising⌠they were discussing it like this.
Does no Blender developer ever look over the fence how other applications are doing this stuff?
They donât have to copy it 1-to-1, but Blender is not the first application that incorporates geo nodes networks like this. 
imho, different colored lines for certain functionality would be best. Itâs visually less jarring than dashed lines.
Folks,
Note that Pablo had in mind colored lines by type in his design and that seem like a very good idea
So colors might not be available
