easyrsa gen-crl does not modify the crl.pem in place but rather remove the old file and create a new one, which means any hardlink to it will get broken again at each invocation of easyrsa gen-crl.
If hardlink to this file is not going to work anyway and we still need it to be readable by OpenVPN, we're better off copying it and chmod-ing it every time a new one is detected on container start, using the conditional expression file1 -nt file2.