[PeterisP]

The key benefits of an ECS system with large static arrays of data is (a) to avoid the speed overhead of managing memory allocation and deallocation - instead of doing it automatically or manually, these memory allocations/deallocations never happen during operations, allocated just once at startup and deallocated all at once; (b) avoid the memory overhead of having to store any metadata per each item, as your basic unit of allocation is "all items of this kind" and, very importantly, (c) ensure memory locality, that all the consecutive items are always in continuous memory in a cache-friendly manner, as you're going to repeatedly iterate over all of them.

No construction made up of any kind of pointers can achieve that, unless there's a Sufficiently Smart compiler that can magically fully eliminate these pointers.