He was talking about macro assemblers, which often do provide naming and some level of type checking (and pure assembly is arguably at a lower level of abstraction than type systems, with separate instructions and registers for integers, pointers, floating-point etc).

I agree it's a somewhat odd comparison.

There are of course plenty of obvious and non-obvious ways to optimize linked lists, but even still they have poor performance characteristics, space efficiency and cache locality compared to alternative structures like arrays and even immutable arrays.

There's a reason Java, C#, Python etc store strings as immutable arrays; not only do they start from a generally better performance baseline than lists, but they too have well-understood optimization characteristics.