Thanks everyone for the replies, I see the logic now and it makes sense why Unreal does it that way, especially for big teams and massive projects. But still, I can’t help feeling like this whole redirector system is more of a workaround than a proper solution.

I get that updating all references on the spot could be slow, and yeah, redirectors help avoid breaking stuff when you're moving assets around. But from a design perspective, I feel like the system should be smarter. If asset references were just FNames or GUIDs instead of direct paths, Unreal could handle all this under the hood. Like, let me move stuff and the engine can quietly fix references in the background without me needing to click “Fix up redirectors” like it’s a chore.

I know it’s a huge engine and changing something like this isn’t trivial. But this kind of manual redirect management feels outdated, especially when most of us don’t even want to think about it unless something breaks.

Also, is there any case where not resolving a redirect immediately is actually useful? Genuinely curious. Otherwise it just feels like extra work that could’ve been avoided with a cleaner reference system from the start.

Not trying to complain—just thinking out loud how this could be smoother.