Mutating a std::vector is much more difficult because you need a coarse lock and serialize every access with it - there's no other option. Linked lists, on the other hand, can be made thread-safe with a single coarse lock, or many finer-grained locks, or atomics, or fancier tricks like RCU.
All of that is difficult, sure, but what is less difficult than thread-safe linked lists?
Every day, all day. It is a myth that linked lists fell out of fashion.
Of course, "it depends". There are things that better live in tightly-packed arrays (large lists of free-standing objects), but there are things that are almost impossible without linked lists. In these cases, being "intrusive" has massive advantages.
I guess you can spend an entire coder career without having to use linked lists, and then you cannot imagine why anybody would ever use them (and make it a meme). The linked lists that do exist in your programs may be abstracted away from your visibility.
Therefore: sure, an article about linked lists will spawn numerous HN comments from such coders who don't know the shoulders they're standing on. It's linked lists all the way down... below the flat surface of high-level frameworks.
Mutating a std::vector is much more difficult because you need a coarse lock and serialize every access with it - there's no other option. Linked lists, on the other hand, can be made thread-safe with a single coarse lock, or many finer-grained locks, or atomics, or fancier tricks like RCU.
All of that is difficult, sure, but what is less difficult than thread-safe linked lists?