> It's surprising people are arguing about this. That fact alone shows that lots of developers don't understand the relationship between L1/L2 cache, data access patterns, and how prefetching works.

Your misconception lies in the assumption that the only conceivable use case is iterating over a preallocated data structure to do read-only operations.

Once you add real world usages, with CRUD operations involving memory allocations/reallocations then your misconception about cache crumbles, and you start to understand why "people are arguing over this".