If you're provisioning lots of Windows machines, why not just make these two commands part of that process?
I suppose the issue at hand here is that - at minimum - it appears that use of symbolic links requires a Group Policy that specifies both support for mklink and fsutil to be configured, the former requiring admin-equivilency to enable symbolic links to work for a non-admin user.
As someone who grew up using 'ln -s' in userspace to create symbolic links, this seems to be a rather high barrier to use of a very convenient user function - "Want to use symbolic links for convenience? Have your admin create GPOS to facilitate this" seems a half-assed answer....
How much upstream effort must occur to facilitate downstream userspace day-to-day function(s)?
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I'll perform whatever action is required to enable user functionality. That's what I'm here for.
But I don't agree/understand why the user-use of something as basic as symbolic links is dependent on an Admin having a clue.
Hopefully they'll act on the feedback of the insider-track release users, and those enabling developer mode in the more stable releases, and this will iron out the vast majority of problems before they just enable it by default for all users.
I know this means enterprise users and main-stream (non insider-track) users will be stuck without this functionality (obviously available in unix land for decades) for a while yet, but I'd rather MS rolled this out in a responsible manner rather than just open the flood-gates of potential malware. Symlinks may be basic, but they have been the cause of many nasty vulnerabilities in Linux over the years. Hopefully MS is just being cautious and in a year or so all Windows users will be able to create symlinks without any admin interjection at all.
From strictly a security perspective we need to lock down machines and remove admin rights because clients are a serious threat to our internal networks. But we pay out the nose in terms of productivity, employee happiness, innovation, etc. Even if Microsoft fixes all of these little things that currently require careful thought by a sysadmin before deploying that's just Microsoft. There's still plenty of poorly written software out there that requires admin rights. And that's new software, not legacy. Requiring sysadmin intervention every time someone wants to try something, especially just on a local machine is a huge drag on everyone involved.
Right now the idea is still young and as far as I know hasn't been productized yet but it looks a lot like Google's Beyond Corp[0] system of shrinking the perimeter to exclude clients, treat them as potentially hostile by default and have access to resources based on a dynamic threat assesment seems like the best way forward. Users have flexibility and freedom and the company is protected. But I think it's still out of reach for most companies. It will take projects and products to make it feasible and even then a lot of companies are still struggling to do basic "hard outside squishy interior" properly.