Yeah symlinks being a 404 is to be expected. Redirects should work fine though, what isn’t working?
As for them changing the path, well yes, it’s a redirect not a rewrite. This is just a standard redirect.
I was using symlinks with GitHub Pages before and am trying to recreate the behavior in Cloudflare Pages. The redirect isn’t a dealbreaker though.
The issue I was having with them is that they didn’t seem to be working with my custom domain. It turns out that I was just trying to access them as a file with pages.dev and as a directory with my custom domain. Updating my _redirects file for both cases has fixed this.