Is there something I can do to update linked objects without saving, exiting, and reopening the .blend file?
Not at the moment unfortunately. Hopefully this will change in the near future. Its just as well blender is pretty damn fast at saving/loading files…
Haha that’s true, and thank you for the reply!
I had the same question a few days ago, and this addon really helped me out. I use it all the time. Using this model also forced me to do the scene properly. As it turned out I had some models that were appended and or not optimal set up for linking (like unapplyed modifiers on physics => consume much space). When setting up my scene(s) properly with linked models I could reduce the file size from 60MB to 2MB.