Replacing large linked lists with arrays is rarely an actual win. With an array, insertion and deletion become far more expensive, virtual memory is more likely to become fragmented or grow monotonically, and the cache misses avoided are almost certainly irrelevant to total performance.

Highly performant code tends to get complex. One way to ensure high performance and reduce complexity is to deal with values, not pointers; it is good for concurrency (no aliasing), excellent for cache locality, and the value is right there. Multi-versioned stable values work excellently, like RCU-locks in the Linux kernel.