Wouldn't an authenticated linked list data structure be a very simple append-only database? That's the whole critique, as storage technologies they are very bare-bones, and they make trade offs that just don't come up organically in most software development, you normally are building distributed systems for performance and availability, blockchains provide availability at the cost of performance to satisfy the requirement that writers be downright adversarial in nature, and you normally simply don't allow untrusted parties to access the database.