Did they ever explain why netlink was involved? Or was that a red herring?
Seemed like a red herring. They were able to reproduce it without any libraries. Might have just been net link forcing the stacks to a certain size and that made the bug visible.
The netlink function uses a larger stack than most.
Their repro case required a stack adjustment larger than 1<<12 (4kiB).
The stack in that specific function was big enough to trigger the bug.