Other people are of the opinion that the invention of the symbolic link
was a huge mistake.

I guess I haven't heard that one.  What is the argument that we were
better off without symbolic links?

Numerous security bugs in tar (extracting a specially crafted archive with symlinks could overwrite arbitrary file) and in coreutils.

For example, to walk directory path without following symlinks, you must break the path to elements and repeatedly use
h = open(element, O_RDONLY | O_NOFOLLOW);
fchdir(h);
--- latest coreutils have it, but it's obvious that a lot of file-manipulation programs doesn't, making them unsafe to operate on user's directories from root account.

Mikulas
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