Yep, that's exactly what I did (because of the same concerns) in one of my projects, which is why I was initially surprised to see them recommend unordered_map.

Yep, that's exactly what I did (because of the same concerns) in one of my projects, which is why I was initially surprised to see them recommend unordered_map. But, as the other commenter pointed out, unordered_map has way less "hops" and thus provides a significant improvement over a search tree in terms of locality.