Thanks. I just read that local to local (which for rclone the mounted drive is, as you pointed out) the symlinks are copied as symlinks. I thought the symlinks were always copied as .rclonelink files when using sync and then they are translated to symlinks when copying back. I think the docs should be clarified with that.
I've tried using this rclone sync :local,links:"C:\Symlinks" "B:\testing" ...the rest of the arguments minus --links and this time it worked as I was expecting, symlinks are copied as .rclonelink files, but why? I couldn't find any documentation regarding the use of :local,sync:source syntax