"Failed to execute operation: Too many levels of symbolic links" on `systemctl enable influxd`

I’m trying to run influxd at boot on an Ubuntu 16.04 droplet, but systemctl enable influxd fails with

“Failed to execute operation: Too many levels of symbolic links”

This has been going on for the past year, since v1.1.1 to the current v1.4.2. More details on GitHub.

On a different Ubuntu 16.04 VPS, I don’t have this problem. What could be wrong?