Not sure if this is relevant, but I was in a discussion about heap layout a while ago, and one of the commenters was talking about how they were able to have classic lisp-style linked lists with decent performance by using a copying garbage collector: https://ziggit.dev/t/memory-layout-suggestions-for-tcl-inter...

Or were you referring more to all the intermediate allocations that aren't the object heap? V8's zones are interesting in this area, because they're like an arena, except that they're only partially reset when a zone ends, so zones can nest inside each other.