Linked lists are probably most common in memory managers, and in embedded programming where memory is very tight, timing is critical, and the cache might be limited. Memory managers use intrusive linked lists to manage the free list; they need a data structure that doesn’t require malloc or new, can grow & shrink dynamically without relocating, and has constant time inserts & deletes from the middle of the list.

Linked lists aren’t very common in desktop application programming, if they ever were, and non-intrusive linked lists as container classes do seem particularly prone to having better alternatives, especially naïve implementations that allocate the list nodes and node content separately. One of the best reasons to reach for a linked list is to avoid all calls to new or malloc or free, so doubling up on them is especially silly.

I don’t think this is really a 70s thing though. Linked lists might have been used slightly more often in the past, but I think they’ve always been used far less than arrays, and my old algorithms books that predate std::vector just use arrays. Maybe the main utility of linked lists is to teach about pointers and algorithm complexity. They do make good examples of pointer management and of algorithms with different big-O than arrays, hashes, trees, etc. I maybe used linked lists a couple of times in games programming, but have rarely ever used them, while they were covered thoroughly in school.