I think a few things can be true at the same time. A (doubly-)linked list is an elementary data structure. It is reasonable to expect implementation of such data structures to require no special magic, since they are one of the first data structures many people learn. There is minimal use for these data structures in modern programming so the exercise is a bit academic. Every doubly linked list I have written in vaguely recent memory, and there haven’t been many, used indirect addressing (like indexes) and not pointers.

While I don’t think it matters that much in practice for many types of systems software, I think it is fair to recognize that this lack of basic expressivity is occasionally troublesome and an unexpected gap in the context of classical computer science for someone learning Rust.