> A problem there is that in memory the arrays are of course laid out one after the other, which actually destroys cache locality if you need to access more than 1 property inside a loop (it will need to load back and forth to the different property arrays), so it's a somewhat dumb approach.

This is actually why memory layout != DoD. You need to account for this in the architecture of the program, so that the systems only operate on a small amount of data that are relevant to them at one time.

The tradeoff is paying for all the data, all the time, and some of the data most of the time. For a large class of programs that can be architected around mostly non-unique, trivially copyable fields with few relations, the tradeoff between AoS and SoAs is obvious.

For other programs where your entities need relational information and form trees or graphs, it can be less obvious whether the data representation is going to be faster. However in these cases you store the relationship as your data (for example, as an adjacency matrix), but implementing any kind of textbook algorithm over it is basically reverse engineering pointers with indexes.