Another underrated benefit is this is potentially a lot faster. A flat array, which you can use to store this, is a lot more cache friendly to a CPU than a data

Another underrated benefit is this is potentially a lot faster. A flat array, which you can use to store this, is a lot more cache friendly to a CPU than a data structure with a lot of pointers. (Although this mostly requires a language like C++ where you can control the memory layout)