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.)