You can use the Digital Garden plugin to publish your files and you will have control over what you are willing to publish by adding dg-publish: true to the frontmatter of the note.
An index file – you cannot have a Digital Garden without one – will need to be added both dg-publish: true and dg-home: true.
Plugin and setup info:
Template repo:
If this is not the route you’d want to go down on, I reckon some similar property can be used with that other plugin.
Otherwise symlinking back to the same vault in this case I don’t consider a good idea. I do use symlinks for out-of-vault stuff here and there so that many or large files don’t count toward sync/git quota.