I scrapped everything and moved to more modern tools: one script on a Cloudflare Worker, with the links (and the Terraform state) in R2. You can use what I'm hosting if you want, or clone it and deploy your own. Here are some of the characteristics:
It's free-ish. It runs on Cloudflare's free tier, which serves something like a hundred thousand requests a day.
It's stateless-ish. Each link is an immutable JSON object in R2. No traditional databases or servers, nothing to really run or maintain.
It's private-ish. There are no click stats, so nobody can see who followed a link, including the person who made it. Cloudflare's edge presumably logs something somewhere, because that's what edges do.
It's funny-ish, if you can remember being 12.
What surprised me most is how simple a task this has become. Not only is writing code much faster, but the architecture and footprint are much smaller. I like to think I'm also better at my job, but that part is probably negligible.
The S3-ish object + short-lived compute architecture was sorta possible in 2020, but not that common as I recall. The simplicity is what let me rework and publish it from the couch in an evening.
You can make a shortlink with it here: https://whats.updog.link
Source (MIT): https://github.com/ignore-prior-instructions/Updog.link