I get that void* lists are even worse, but randomly malloc'ing a bunch of struct-foo's and linking them with pointers is worse than keeping a pool of memory chunks of struct-foo size and maintaining a length counter, since hopping from foo to foo isn't likely to hop from page to page.
With hooked-in lists, you rarely need to navigate through the whole list. You usually just need to get the next one. Having implemented hooked-in lists, the backing for them was a fixed size of memory chunks, but that was one level of abstraction lower. The Linux kernel does something similar.
(Felt I should clarify that it's nothing about hooked-in lists that prevent you from navigating the whole list. It's just the algorithms you end up using to solve the problems that pop-up at that level of systems programming.)
