Answered Symlink to static resource is broken.

The symlink serves no useful purpose, whether it works or not. Just use another static resource for the same file if you need to have it in more than one place.

Anyway, a symlink outputs content - the content of the target resource. It does not stream a file, as a binary static resource does. So you have a PDF resource with content, but no binary file to stream. The most you would ever get out of it is the path that is the content of the static resource.