resizable arrays of pointers to objects stored elsewhere, which is going to blow through your cache anyway, especially when you start accessing those objects' attributes. so it's more a memory management strategy than a performance optimization.

But when removing an item it’s not necessary to visit every element, just re-arrange the pointers (and in CPython, modify the reference count of the item that was removed).

When removing an item by value (being the use case in this thread), you do need to visit the elements to check the value.

Yes but the problem there is not that your list is backed by a linked list or an array, it's that every single value is boxed and needs dereferencing. The difference between no hops and one hop totally trumps one hop vs two hops.