What problem does this feature solve?

The problem to solve is that getOption() clones the internal _model.option variable together with the dataset property. When we manipulate huge datasets duplicating the data is not efficient.

What does the proposed API look like?

So we would like either to have a getOption function which would not provide the dataset.
Or even better a getOption where we can select the key, as for the setOption with replaceMerge option.