We want to remove de form default language in "hreflang"

I’m struggeling with the same issue for EN (main language) and ES (second language) constellation.

The main site in english languare is on root /, but the hreflang-tags refer to /en/ instead of /. Even if the URLs are being redirected, this causes hundreds of (not necessary) redirects and our page will drop on Google for no reason I guess.

Has anyone a solution for that?

Thank you very much in advance!

~~ Mikey79

This is a second report on this issue, not sure if the same people.
My impression is that setting “x-default” and “hreflang”, as they are now, is what google recommends. It is expected to have redirects on multilingual site and google should not penalize for that. /de on default url ensures that the language will be switched to ‘de’ when url is clicked. “x-default” is a bare url without language encoded, which may be redirected by cookies or browser settings to a url for a specific language.

I am not quite sure what is the true right way. Both ways have reasonable logic to be justified. I would appreciate if somebody spend time researching it for sure and letting us know which document on internet we can send people to when answering this issue. Thanks a lot!