It is more complex for hardware to keep track of for sure. It's been a feature of high performance cores for more than a decade though. Kernels tend to be based off of linked lists, so it's a massive win typically.
I can time how long it takes to iterate through an array and show that it is faster than iterating through a linked list with the same number of elements.
Now, what optimization would I have to impleemnt to end up with a program that iterates through this linked list faster than the equivalent array?
Thats always been my experience of them.
Linked lists still show up in the kernel, in redis, in game engines and so on because you can't build fast intrusive collections using arrays.
Making linked lists "as fast as we can make them" doesn't mean they're competitive with a vector.
Do you have anything substantial to add to that?