Wayfinder

What exactly is the menu displaying when you use [*parent*] as the startId? If you want submenus do not use the &hideSubMenus=`true`

Wayfinder will generate a nested, unordered list consisting of all the documents in the folder you specify. If you don’t want the top-level items to show, but only their children, then you’d need to use multiple Wayfinder calls, one for each submenu. Or...

You could set up the top-level row’s template (the chunk) to give a classname to each A tag, then in your CSS give them display:none. While they would still be in the source, at least they wouldn’t show on the page.