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That's rather the point. When presenting a view of the file system under some particular directory, it's nice to not have to hard-link every file into place, and instead include wholesale directory trees. That's my most common use case for symlinks.

Doesn't this specific criticism hold for hard links too?

It's mitigated in that you can't hard link a directory (except in recent MacOS). So I suppose you would always know the real cwd of your shell, for instance.

adding OS X hard link discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/80875/what-is-the-bash-co...

There are other problems with symlinks too: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/symlinks

Every command that operates on files needs an extra flag to tell it whatever it should follow symlinks, or operate on the target, or on the symlink itself, etc.

Only commands capable of doing something meaningful with symlinks need such a flag. These are a minority.

Any program that manipulates or traverses file trees is affected, and a few more, in an OS that is built around the concept of hierarchical file systems, this is quite a few.