Currently, wbgetentities provides a redirects parameter which allows the api module to resolve redirects automatically. This should also be provided in the wbgetclaims module.
For example, https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbgetclaims&entity=Q8577237&property=P301 should be able to return 12190402 instead of 6449034.
I think those are two different things, one of the them is resolving when the entity is loaded, the other is when only referencing it. Why is this needed? You can still resolve while requesting it.
This issue popped up recently for the Wikidata:Menu Challenge where we have a fixed list of entities. Once some of them got merged (and thus redirected) wbgetclaims fails whereas wbgetentities (to get labels) goes on happily.
Even wbgetentities loads the entity enough to get the label so most users would expect getting a claim of the same entity to work in the same way.
This task is about resolving entity references in the result not about the working on redirected ids. I filed T100703 for that.
I don't think this is really tech debt, this is just a feature / some functionality that has not been requested before.
For example, T59744 that added the redirect ability (and the other linked tasks) don't mention that api modules should follow them.
And here is the request for the functionality for wbgetentities T88902