Back in the day what is being called out here as an "intrusive" linked list was just a linked list, since you didn't have the luxury of having memory and CPU cycles to waste with extra allocations and indirection.

In the C++ world the STL introduced generic data types such as linked lists, which became the default, but "instrusive" linked lists still have their place in specialized list-heavy use cases where performance matters. In a previous job I wrote a widely adopted XML/JSON library using instrusive lists to link child elements, and the performance benefit was considerable, with my DOM API basically hiding this implementation detail from the user.