I wish ss was part of the default install. I know that netstat is available but it's considered deprecated and pretty much anywhere now ss is available.
What is the reason to not include it if iproute2 is already there?
I can not answer your question but want to highlight that the default iproute2 is just a minimal version. You also need to install ip-full to get iproute2 and not the striped down version from BusyBox.
But I agree that ss and bridge should/could be included in the default image.
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The default netstat is a busybox app, and as such is probably a couple kilobytes in additional size (hard to say as it's all built into the busybox binary). ss is a standalone utility, which requires (at least kmod-netlink-diag as an additional package), and all combined adds about 100k to disk space requirements. Every little thing added to the base configuration pushes more and more older devices into the landfill when the next release comes out and the 4/32 limit becomes 8/64 becomes 16/256...
Now on my x86 devices, I've got space to burn and install ss (and full GNU sort and gawk and on and on) as a matter of course, but on my all-in-ones with their limited flash size, I usually just live with busybox utilities.
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You are correct, requirements are growing over time. That's a good reason to wonder if 100 KB are still a big deal or negligible.
Of course the idea here is that 'ss' it's quite a basic needed tool.
Even new high-end routers (so solid triple figures) tend to come with 256 MB NAND flash, of which often only 20-40 MB are usable for the firmware (dual-firmware and suboptimal OEM partitioning). Size increases don't just affect old devices, but they can also limit rather current ones.
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I see, that's very unfortunate.