The point was that, from within Perl itself (and not dipping into XS), the array is the best data structure for handling the needs of a linked list. Yeah, you could create a hashref for each node and put in references to the next element. But, I would be shocked and appalled if doing that was faster than the corresponding array implementation.

The only benefit I can see is if you are translating algorithms directly from C (or a similar language) and want to have functions that you can pass nodes and it can call $node->next or $node->prev. But, translating functions to take $arr and $idx instead and $node->next translates to $arr->[$idx+1] is probably saner.