MacOS – Copy directory structure and symlink files (alternative to `cp -as`)

I'm looking for how to recursively copy a directory structure and then fill the copy with symlinks to the corresponding files from the source directory. This has a simple solution in Linux in the form of cp -as, but cp seems to lack the s option on macOS Mojave.

The underlying goal is to automate the process of making applications that do not reside in /Applications show up in Launchpad.

What would be an elegant, preferrably future proof, alternative to this on macOS?

From doing brew search cp I get the impression that Homebrew does not have an alternative version of cp.

Update

Additional information

I'm currently running this regularly, but I want to improve it by making it recursive:

ln -s /<Source app directory>/*.app /Applications

It also has to preserve the directory structure because:

1. Subdirectories are used to manage sets of applications that are to be excluded from backup, without having to manually change Time Machine settings every time I add a new application. For instance, games are large and do not need to be backed up. Same goes for versions of Xcode.

2. A mere symlink to a subdirectory does not include its linked target's applications in Launchpad.

3. A symlinked directory would prevent creating a real directory with the same name. That prevents the source and destination directories from being organised identically.