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What happens then if you try to copy that 2TB of 'data' to a filesystem that doesn't support links? 60TB would be used in that case.

There are some use cases that are computationally expensive to figure out and don't have a simple/easy answer to solve.

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That's not the information that dialog is purporting to display. That's a theoretical thing you've made up for this comment.

It's a real thing that happens all the time when copying. Delete is a different operation, but now you're asking for a different space calculator when performing delete which will have its own set of bugs and performance issues.

Hard links are a pathological case.

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