This is a question I see asked all the time and it's absolutely mind-boggling to me that you could ask it. Who do you think writes the linked-list libraries you use? Do you think the libraries just magically appear when someone wishes them up? Do you think we should use the current set of libraries forever, calling them "good enough", and limiting ourselves to current programming languages for all of history? That's what will happen if we no longer teach people to write these things; or else (more realistically) we leave it up to them to make the same mistakes and waste time solving the same problems which were solved decades ago, because no one ever bothered to teach them the answers. Give it a few years and we'll have no one left who can program in anything but javascript; no one left to write the browsers! --- or so I worry when I read HN sometimes.
You'll notice I'm not suggesting we stop teaching them. But what you describe are specialised applications; my point is that where linked lists were once something that every programmer, large and small, could reliably expect to have to write repeatedly, they're now something that are only directly relevant to, say, library maintainers.
