Configuring homepage_sections

I'm trying to configure this as a "normal" bootstrap menu, so for a section with children I have added a clickable version of the section so that the "section" click open it and the first item takes the user to the folder. That works fine.

The issue is items in the dropdown which themselves have children, which are inactive. Is there a recommended way to address this? I had thought that setting bottomLevel would control the depth but apparently not. I don't see an elegant way to customise homepage_sections to fix these (I do see an inelegant way!), but since the default behaviour gives "dead" menu items, I wondered if I was overlooking something?

Start by locating the homepage_sections implementation and reading how bottomLevel is handled for nested children. Reproduce the inactive dropdown-item case and determine the expected navigation behavior; done means documenting or confirming a configuration or change that prevents dead menu items.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.