Does creating a symbolic link to another symbolic link have any side-effects?

In general, no. Technically, there will be a very slight performance hit for the indirection, but it won’t be noticeable to your application. As an example, most shared libraries are symlinks to symlinks (e.g. libQtCore.so -> libQtCore.so.4 -> libQtCore.so.4.7 -> libQtCore.so.4.7.1).