[Quoting from the PR comments]

> traverse is from follow_symlinks and only applies to symlinks. It does not apply to other types of reparse points.

I get your argument that junctions are not symlinks, but I disagree that we should try this hard to emulate POSIX semantics rather than letting the OS do its thing. We aren't reparsing anything ourselves (in the PR) - if the OS is configured to do something different because of a reparse point, we're simply going to respect that instead of trying to work around it.

A user who has created a directory junction likely wants it to behave as if the directory is actually in that location. Similarly, a user who has created a directory symlink likely wants it to behave as if it were in that location. Powershell treats both the same for high-level operations - the LinkType attribute is the only way to tell them apart (mirrored in the st_reparse_tag field).

> If we've opened the reparse point to test for a symlink, we must reopen for all other types

The premise here is not true - we've opened the reparse point to get the file attributes. The only reason we look at the reparse tag at all is to raise an error if the user requested traversal and despite that, we ended up at a link, and I'm becoming less convinced that should be an error anyway (this is different from nt.readlink() and ntpath.realpath(), of course, where we want to read the link and return where it points).

nt.stat() is trying to read the file attributes, and if they are not accessible then raising is the correct behaviour, so I don't see why we should try any harder than the OS here.