Resolving symlinks during staging causes various issues:

* Split rules may not work properly as the resolved paths will differ
  depending on whether another artifact with a directory symlink has
  been staged in the same root directory or not, e.g., as part of
  compose.

* The order of symlinks in file lists is difficult to get right to
  guarantee consistent and predictable behavior as paths in a file list
  might rely on symlinks in the same file list. See #647 and #817.

* Staging order differences can lead to surprising results. See #390.

* Difficult to properly support absolute symlinks. Absolute symlinks are
  currently converted to relative symlinks, however, this doesn't always
  work. See #606 and #830.

This will require changes in projects that rely on the current behavior.
However, the changes are expected to be small and are often a sign of
buggy element files. E.g., elements that don't fully obey `bindir` or
`sbindir` variables.