It took me about a minute to find an instance of list linking in Java sources (OpenJDK):

  class JVMCIRuntime: public CHeapObj<mtJVMCI> {
    ../
    JVMCIRuntime* _next;

The Linux kernel has list linking all over the place. Userland libraries and utilities ditto.

I don't think I've ever worked on a C++ or C project that had no linked lists anywhere. I'm trying to think of an example but coming up blank.

Quite often but not always linked lists in C are intrusive. Certain object are going to be put into exactly one list. Or more than my list but only one at a time. So the link pointer or pointers are embedded into that object. And so no memory allocation is required to insert those objects into a list. A classic example of this is putting a process structure onto a scheduling queue. You would never want a vector for this, for reasons that a professional such as yourself should understand.