Create a symbolic link to desktop and documents folder in iCloud Drive

Is it possible to use iCloud drive like Dropbox? What I want to do is create a symbolic link to Desktop, Documents and perhaps my Downloads folder in iCloud Drive, similar to how I'd do it in Dropbox. I don't want to use the 'Desktop and Documents' setting in iCloud. It does some weird stuff with my Desktop and Documents folder locally.

Apple has a built-in setting to do basically exactly what you want. It's not technically a symlink, but it accomplishes the same functionality. It also gracefully handles different desktops on different machines. And it all works as expected in the Files app on iOS:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206985

Just enter the below line into your terminal and you can navigate to your iCloud via the terminal.

ln -s "/Users/$USER/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs" iCloud

Yes, it's entirely possible.

You can create a directory in ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents and then symlink that wherever you like.