One of the strengths of the symlink is that the system treats it as a path to a location. This is why it stays intact even when updating your libraries.
The joys of different file systems.
For the most part the “right” way to deal with the Mac file system(s) is to use aliases. They work like a charm. Except when they don’t.
Symlinks to external drives is a great way to help with massive library locations.
Now if there were enough ports on the laptops. 1TB SSD prices are down low. Mostly depends on the device speeds — USB3 enclosures should allow 100+Mbyte/sec transfers, but it sure is nice to have 300+ MB/sec on an internal SSD. Those orchestral libraries take an eon to load.
I guess for my ideal music machine I want 4TB of superfast SSD, 64GB+ of RAM, 8 cores or more. iMac Pro gets close — could I get rid of the screen and add more storage please?