Have you ever wanted to do something like cp -r, but doing something different for certain subpaths?

... You haven't?

Well here is how to do it anyway:

find . -false \
      -o -path . \
      -o -path ./log -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
      -o -path ./view/smarty3 -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
      -o -name .git -prune \
      -o -type d -exec mkdir $out/{} \; \
      -o -type f -exec cp --reflink=auto {} $out/{} \;

that is: don't do anything with ., with ./log or ./view/smarty3 populate them with a symlink and then don't descend any further into them, ignore any .git directory anywhere, and with any other path, copy it normally. (The -false is just so I can start every line with -o.)

(This example in particular could be ~mostly replicated with rsync --exclude and putting in the symlinks afterwards, but minor modifications would make that not work anymore; also, it's possible to combine the two symlink branches in this case, but it's ugly.)