Intrusive lists are not bad. Building one does not require heap allocation unless the object itself is heap allocated. I can imagine this being case for a list of console commands, just a bunch of static allocated structs in various places tied together via intrusive list. In fact we (abother game company) are also how are doing it today as well

As for the linear search, it is just console commands. User types it and then it makes a search in what, a couple hundred entries at most? Sounds perfectly fine