Comment 10 for bug 1960749

So the reason why the symlinks are there is because they could be pointing to directories and then if you had a file extracted in there, you'd get not found if you'd skip the symlink. Like consider

/usr/share/doc/foo/bar as a symlink to /usr/share/foo/bar

and another package installs a file into /usr/share/doc/foo/bar/ rather than the canonical location.

This is documented in the dpkg manual page and tracked upstream in

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=859646

dpkg -V is tracked upstream in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=975338