Building bonds with firmlinks
To pull off the illusion of a single, unified volume, Apple added support to APFS for firmlinks. Like the name implies, a firmlink lies conceptually between a soft link and a hard link. That probably doesn't make them any more clear though (even for people familiar with soft and hard links!). A firmlink is described by Apple as a "bi-directional wormhole" between two filesystems. Let's take a look at the "Users" folder as an example – the Users folder at the root level of the System volume is actually a firmlink that points to the Users folder at the root level of the Data volume. If you attempt to navigate to the /Users folder on the System volume, you're actually going to see the content of the /Users folder on the Data volume. Likewise, suppose you're looking at a folder on your Desktop (so you're looking at the contents of the Data volume) and then you navigate upwards several levels. When you get to the parent of the "Users" folder, you're no longer looking at the Data volume, rather that firmlink has transported you back to the root level of the System volume.
There are about a couple dozen firmlinks on macOS Catalina that link various folders on the System volume to writable counterparts on the Data volume. If you're curious about these, you can find a complete list of firmlinks at /usr/share/firmlinks on your startup disk.
они это вместо fstab придумали что ли?