Maestral will follow local symlinks, even if they point to locations outside of your Dropbox folder, and upload the contents of the destination. It will raise a sync issue in case of broken symlinks. Depending on your platform, you may experience slow indexing and high CPU usage with symlinks, or the linked items may only be synced when restarting Maestral or pausing and resuming sync. Under certain circumstances, the symlink may be silently replaced by the item it points to.
Dropbox has changed how its official client handles symlinks: it will no longer follow symlinks itself but rather upload a placeholder file with symlink metadata. This is currently not supported by Maestral which will simply download the empty placeholder file.
It is therefore not recommended to use symlinks in your Dropbox folder, either with the official client or Maestral. In a future version, Maestral may no longer follow symlinks but sync them as actual files instead. This change will be announced in the release notes.