It doesn’t look like h5py exposes set_elink_acc_flags even at the low level. Adding that would be easy enough, but you’d have to drop down to the low-level API to open the object - more work would be needed to expose a way to use it from the high-level API.
This also reminds me of a similar issue we had with virtual datasets pointing to read only files. In that case, you don’t even get a generic error message, you just get data that appears to be missing:
