Pardon if there is already a feature request for this – my searching only yielded posts merely mentioning of link notifications, but not feature requests to toggle them on/off.
You can opt out of like notifications or even decrease the amount you get. You can opt in/out of topic/category notifications (mute, watch, etc). But you cannot opt out of link notifications. I have some pretty popular posts in another forum, and they get linked around quite a bit, however I wish to not receive notifications whenever someone links my post.
In other cases you may want to link the post of a staff member without the unnecessary notification. In this case the staff members may not necessarily be forum staff but engineers for the parent website, and their posts are the most vulnerable to being linked by many users in different topics, but since they aren’t as involved with the forum community as the very forum community itself, you may out of courtesy not want to clutter their notifications for a topic that they will not even participate in (also, while I can’t speak for them, some may follow categories that are relevant to them, like feature requests/bug report categories).
Is a setting to opt out of link notifications by any chance technically challenging to add? Considering that you can opt out of like notifications, it feels to me like a big oversight.