I don’t think they are redundant at all. I was playing with Kotlin back in the days before apply and also were added (just happened to be looking at my old posts and my second post here was requesting what became the apply method).
When you start nesting them it is very handy to be able to choose beween this or it. I actually proposed variations on apply and run that added an additional parameter but I think the addition of also (referred to as tap in that thread) was considered sufficient.