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Commenter Lee asked how ACLs are evaluated when an object has multiple hard links. I replied with comments of my own, which turned out to be wrong after I did some experiments. Here is what I found out about hard link permissions and believe to be true.

Updated: 2021-06-22 Every object that can have a security descriptor (SD) is a securable object that may be protected by permissions. All named and several unnamed Windows objects are securable and can have SDs, although this is not widely known. There does not even exist a GUI for manipulating the SDs of many object types! Have you ever tried to kill a system process in Task Manager and got the message “Access denied”? This is due to the fact that this process’ SD does not allow even administrators to kill the process. But it is, of course, possible, as an administrator, to obtain the necessary permissions, provided a GUI or some other tool is available.