It's probably not your intention but that statement suggests that volunteer time here is worth less than your own time, and that they should just stop making suggestions and instead help you fix this particular problem.
To resolve this you will need to repair your symlinks, likely something got copied as a real file instead of a symlink, or if it only affects dry run it could just be a bug in the dry run validation.
Perhaps there is a previous thread here that can help, like Cerbot Symlinks on Windows - #3 by leora
If you do decide to use a new acme client the closest to certbot would be simple-acme. If you want to do something on a network drive you typically need to copy via UNC path (mapped drives are only available when logged in a as a profile) and allow the machine identity (MACHINE$) rather than your current users profile. It's pretty much always possible to fully automated renewals, it just depends on your administration knowledge and how much effort you put into setting up the automation.