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Using the metadata API for network options
The way that network options are accessed is changing in WordPress 6.1. Network options have always been stored in a meta table called sitemeta. This name is confusing, as “site” in this context means “network,” not to be confused with blog meta, used to store site metadata. Prior to WordPress 6.1, the functions get_network_option, add_network_option, update_network_options, and delete_network_option used custom database queries and caching. This resulted in some performance issues and lots of code to maintain.
In WordPress 6.1, the network options functions have been updated to use the more established metadata API, which is already used for metadata of other object types like posts, terms, and users. This effectively makes a function like get_network_option a wrapper around get_metadata. This has a number of advantages including: