Dymanimcally add links in main menu (e.g. last 4 nodes)
Make the URLs static; have the content of those URLs change

You were on the right track with views. But don't use it to create a block with the links, use it to create a page that displays the full rendered entity of the last node of your content type. You can give it a URL like /latest-article.

You could get fancy and use contextual arguments to display the 2nd, 3rd, ... offsets (e.g. /latest-article/%) or you could just add four more displays to the view, each with the offset bumped up by one.