Organizing Favourites in Finder with Symlinks and colons

Solution 1:

The filesystem internal separator is : on HFS which is why other Unix don’t existing that generally. There’s no harm I can see to what you propose as its portable across Unix in my experience and harmless on macOS

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

Solution 2:

You can't use the forward slash character in a macOS filename - it is reserved for directories as you indicate in the first half of your question. macOS substitutes forward slash characters with colons, which is portable across all varieties of Unix.

Space | Separator between command arguments

/ | Path delimiter

\ | Escapes the following character

- | Can indicate a command option

[] | Shell scripting tokens

{} | Shell scripting tokens

* | Wildcard (multiple characters)

? | Wildcard (single character)

' | Command argument grouping delimiter

" | Command argument grouping delimiter

More information at this page