> It's so popular because it's the only data structure that is easy to use in C.
I don't understand that statement. Linked lists are no easier or harder to use than other data structures. In all cases you have to implement it once and use it anywhere you want?
Maybe you meant that linked lists are the only structure that can be implemented entirely in macros, as the kernel likes to do? But even that wouldn't be true.
Think about a growable vector. Another basic structure that everyone uses in the userspace.
You can iterate through it fine, it's just an array after all. But then you want to add an element to it. At this point you need to handle reallocation. So you need to copy or move the elements from the old array. But this will break if the elements are not simple data structures.
So you need to have a copy function. There are copy constructors in C++, but not in C. So you need to reinvent them.