> The "two star" solution looks like it generates more memory traffic in the case of many deletions.

It certainly shouldn't. There's no difference at an architectural level between keeping track of prev and keeping track of &prev->next (as should be obvious, because they differ by a constant offset): advancing in the list is just a pointer update via a load either way, and removing a link is just a store.

Since they do the same thing, the opportunity for an LHS stall may be avoided in either approach with a little care.