Are there any tools that make this simple or identify redirect chains?
I have a Chrome extension you can use to audit the internal redirects on a site that might help that checks 100s of pages at a time:
It crawls the pages of site to identify redirect chains (can cause SEO + speed problems), 302 redirects (can cause SEO problems) and redirecting JS/CSS links (can cause speed problems). You can also pull up information like which pages are linking to the same redirecting URL to help you untangle/eliminate them.
I find it pretty common as well that sites will have unintentional redirecting internal links e.g. one page might link to the homepage as example.com instead of www.example.com, triggering a redirect from example.com to www.example.com which slows down browsing for users (similar for http vs https, and tailing slash vs non-trailing slash links).