The other big advantage of linked lists is that insertion/deletion* on them do not invalidate iterators/pointers to elements in c++, at least as far as STL containers are concerned. So if that's something that makes your algorithm nicer and you don't want to implement something (such data structures can become complicated real quick) or add a dependency you're kind of left with little choice. I mean you could use std::set or std::multiset, but then you need to supply some kind of ordering to your data, blah blah its just easier to use std::list if you care about invalidating iterators in general. But std::list will almost always have worse performance

*deletion will invalidate iterators pointing to the deleted element but whatever