>>> and hard linking each file seems an absurd waste of i-nodes.

>> A hard link doesn't consume any inodes; it's just a directory
>> entry.  Hard-linking each file will "waste" one i-node per
>> directory, not one per file.

> Even if you hard link a directory, you're not wasting an inode.  What
> do you think "." and ".." are, anyway?

You misunderstood.  The case in question was not hard-linking a
directory; it was mirroring the directory structure and hard-linking
all the files.