It's macOS magic that requires HFS/APFS and doesn't work at the POSIX layer. It would not work for my use case, no.

An alias is like a hybrid between a symbolic link and a hard link. Like a symbolic link, it's its own file type whose contents point to the original, but like a hard link it points to the original using its ID, not its path. So an alias works even if the original is moved, but it does not increase the original's link count and is its own distinct entity in the file system.