In the modern world, the demand seems to be that every tool be perfectly safe in every situation no matter what you do (and it seems practically nothing lives up to this demand, given the ever increasing river of silly CVEs for almost every component, like regex DoS on build tools).

It's important to understand the scope of the issue. If you create and operate on your own symlinks in your own folders, there is no problem. The problem is when a more privileged user operates on folders that can be written to by less privileged users, for example system daemons (like a /tmp cleanup, or a web server serving /home/*/www), or suid binaries. These things need to be written very carefully, it is now clear.

But if I'm working with my own files, media, source code, build tools, web pages, etc, in my own folders, then symlinks are still fine.

And there is an existing setting to mitigate a couple common forms of the issue that does exist when accessing folders other users can write to: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/sysctl/fs...