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.
Look, people who are excited about this and just want to learn are asking for proof. You can't just make a claim like "it's been a feature of high performance for more a decade" and provide 0 evidence for the claim, because it's not common knowledge and explicitly contradicts what is commonly taught.
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?
I'm sure CPUs will try their best to optimize these usage patterns. But I suspect vector / array based approaches will still always outcompete linked lists in actual benchmarks.
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.
A bunch of people keep saying this with no substantiation - the best we saw was a link to the latest Intel optimization manual that quite specifically refutes this claim. I even quoted it upthread.
