I meant to post this much earlier but completely forgot. Back when we were originally discussing this, I linked this thread in another one where a user was having some strange matching issues. They made the off-hand remark that a workaround to your issue might be to present these files through a filesystem which masked the presence of hard links.
I’m not able to test this right now, but perhaps a bindfs mount, or cifs mount of the directory/directories with the hard-linked files?
If I find the time I might test this myself, as I’m curious now.
For reference, here’s the other thread:
