RTN_GETLINK{} returns not only the link information such as carrier, eth address, etc but also statistics.

RTEXT_FILTER_SKIP_STATS was introduced to skip stats reporting (e.g: ipv6 stats), it was then extended to also skip vf stats (which can be slow).

Maybe it could be extended to also skip link statistics that can be slow to collect on systems with a large number of cpus.

There is no much complexity in the task but upstream might have concerns of uAPI breakage.