Read locked files or a previous version thereof on Windows 10: A successor to Shadow Volume Copy?

TL;DR: Is there a non-deprecated alteative to volume shadow copy?

I am regularly ruing incremental backups of my user-files to exteal drives, including ~/AppData since many programs store backup-worthy information there – be it complex user configurations or savegames.

These backups should be able to run without having to close programs. Sadly on Windows it is quite common for programs to request file-locks that prevent even reading the file (e.g. LibreOffice Calc Spreadsheets) and for programs that use database files for user-data (e.g. eveote, or bookmarks in chrome and firefox) this even perfectly makes sense.

To my understanding VolumeShadowCopy allows to some recent "safe" version of files, and if the service is ruing it is even possible to create a softlink to the shadow volume and access it is a directory. However, this mechanism seems to be deprecated in favor of using File History, which is much more limited. In particular I need backups from multiple source drives to multiple target drives and need to be able to manually manage which versions are kept and for how long.

While is is possible to get VolumeShadowCopy ruing on Windows 10, I was wondering if there is some true successor to this functionality.

Update: I just checked again. While VolumeShadowCopy is technically enabled, and I can create a symlink with

mklink /D C:shadowcopy \?GLOBALROOTDeviceHarddiskVolumeShadowCopy3

trying to enter the directory with cd or pushd will result in an error message "Wrong parameter". Hence even "use volumeshadowcopy for now" is not an option.