Tactical or Natural Internal Linking?

I once read somewhere (think it might have been one of Backlinko's articles) how *more* authority passes onto blog pages with the most internal links pointing to them. Fine. I can live with that. But then it occurred to me... That you have to tactically link pages in terms of frequency (placing *more* links on the pages you want to promote) rather than relevance/UX (where links *ought* to be placed). How can that be right?