Linked lists don’t need defense. It is unfortunate that job of vast majority of developers is rather benign. They don’t work on problems that requires complex algorithms and data structures beyond arrays and dictionaries. But interviewers keep asking those questions and give bad rep to these subjects. However, if you are working on building any real infrastructures such as search, deep learning, cloud, crypto, game engines, OS, compilers etc then you need linked lists, graphs, trees and myriad of algorithms surrounding them all the time. There is clearly different tier of developers who work on such infrastructure and those you simply utilize infrastructures others have built.