[kindall]

resizable arrays of pointers to objects stored elsewhere, which is going to blow through your cache anyway, especially when you start accessing those objects' attributes. so it's more a memory management strategy than a performance optimization.

[pansa2]

But when removing an item it’s not necessary to visit every element, just re-arrange the pointers (and in CPython, modify the reference count of the item that was removed).

[sokoloff]

When removing an item by value (being the use case in this thread), you do need to visit the elements to check the value.

[hiptobecubic]

Yes but the problem there is not that your list is backed by a linked list or an array, it's that every single value is boxed and needs dereferencing. The difference between no hops and one hop totally trumps one hop vs two hops.