This seems dangerous and gives me the heebie jeebies, but I can't put my finger on exactly why. It just feels like bad practice to move my important files somewhere else and link to them, but I've never trusted the cloud anyway.
It is in the nature of clouds that they change and sometimes go away. I don't want my .bashrc going away.
Since dropbox keeps the synced config files on your computer, the only issue you would run into is if you accidentally delete the files on one computer and dropbox deletes the files off all of your other computers. I've been using Borg to backup my files for a while now, and it treats symlinks the same way dropbox does after this most recent change. Having my .bashrc be a simlink that points to another file hasn't been an issue.
You’re letting your emotions about Dropbox color this: if you think of Dropbox as a version control system, it’s something with decades of precedent to have symlinks pointing to a checkout.
No, previously you were relying on a magic Dropbox hack that broke symlinks, whereas now the file system can be used properly and symlinks work like actual symlinks.