I've done a lot of work with graph network libraries in R/ggplot2 for data visualization, even figuring out how to make them interactive, in WebGL for scaling to hundreds of nodes, with minor code changes.

Tutorial/Intro: http://minimaxir.com/2016/12/interactive-network/

Practical example using HaveIBeenPwned data: http://minimaxir.com/2016/12/pwned-network/

The catch is that this trick uses the ggnetwork library, which is less-actively developed than ggraph. I remember trying to port the interactive code to ggraph but with not much success (since ggnetwork serves a more of a translator for native ggplot2 functions, while ggraph offers more flexibility). Now that the official release of graph is out, I'll give these types of visualizations another try.