Is “via” needed when creating a Linux IP route?

To get static routing working I needed a route like one of

# specific destination
sudo ip -6 route add fc:1::9/128 via fc::2 dev enp0s31f6r
sudo ip -6 route add fc:1::9/128  via fc::2 
#range of addresses
sudo ip -6 route add fc:1::/64 via fc::2  dev enp0s31f6
sudo ip -6 route add fc:1::/64 via fc::2 

If I a route without the via

sudo ip -6 route add fc:1::9/128 dev enp0s31f6

then it ignored my static routing and did Neighbor Solicitation; it asked adjacent systems if they had knew about the IP address fc:1::9. This is an IP V6 Neighbour Discovery facility.

There were hints around the internet that if the next hop address is not specified, then the “next hop router” will try to locate the passed address.

So the short answer to the question is: “yes. You should specify it when using static routing”.