Every one of those files is in /sbin though

Only if its the last hard link. If nothing else, its a wee bit of insurance from deletion since no single link removal should remove the file.

Anecdote, eons ago, we had a problem where the vendor needed to log in to the machine with the intent that they were going to upload some utilities, fix a problem, and then delete them.

Before I let them in, I set up a script that constantly scanned the directory tree they were in, and hard linked everything so I could look at what they were using later.

that isn't generally how hardlinks work: you need to delete all instances of it to delete the file, as opposed to having one 'real' file like with symlinks.

That's a problem with directory hardlinks: a recursive deletion will wipe the directory (in the same way that truncate will destroy a file regardless of how many hardlinks it has). But we don't usually allow directory hardlinks these days.

It's more of a problem that changes to one linked file change the only copy. But this depends on your filesystem. Not all work this way.