Links to items in other collections are stripped out of collection JSON #775

I intended to create a collection that has links to items that sit in other collection. The "item" links are stripped out of the collection JSON when updating a collection via the stac-fastapi. Only an "item empty" collection is shown after the update.
My use case is that I have a collection for each weather recording device and each time metadata for a device changes a stac item with a full new set of metadata is created as part of the weather device collection. Each item of metadata has a start_datetime and an end_datetime except for the latest one which does not have and end_datetime. This way there is a record of every metadata change and it is clear which one the item with the latest metadata information is.
I'd like to have a collection that links to all the current/latest items across all weather device collections. I'd prefer not to duplicate items and have the same information living in two places - the weather device collection and in a "latest" collection (which would be an obvious work around).
Should this kind of "empty" collections with relative links to items in other collections be supported? Or is there another way to achieve this?
Thanks for your help and advice.

(FYI as a side issue the "rel" links for "aggregate", "aggregations", and "queryables" are automatically added the JSON each time I
(1.) load the collection JSON, (2.) add an "item" link to the collection and (3.) update the collection via an API with the new JSON. The JSON keeps growing in length each time I go through the process above.)