iproute2 and libbpf: vendoring on the small scale

Only if the basic stuff you need to know includes nothing at all about the routing table. It's hard for me to imagine what networking problem that might be :) and the route output is, uh, completely different (and even more wildly inaccurate than ifconfig's, to such an extent that it's often impossible to use it to tell what's going where).

Meanwhile in the ip world we have 'ip route get', which can tell you which route will be used for a packet to a given address. This is immensely valuable with complex multi-table routing setups and would on its own justify the existence of ip, in my eyes (though of course you can't set up such things at all with the ifconfig/route tools).