The compiler manipulating linked lists to get your program into executable form, versus that program manipulating linked lists to do its job, are different things.

You're also likely provoking list manipulation by running C hello world. The C grammar has lists, like lists of parameter declarators in a function, or argument expressions in a function call.

By the time you've compiled your C program, you've likely "used", lists, trees and hash tables.

Classic line-numbered BASIC interpreters stored the lines as a linked list. For instance in

  10 PRINT "Hello"
  20 GOTO 10
the 10 line is stored as a datum which has a pointer to the 20. Some BASIC implementations implemented a forward GOTO as a linear search through the linked list starting at the current line, and a backwards GOTO as a scan from the beginning.

So in addition to not being able to write C hello without linked lists, the same holds for BASIC.

The way you present your idea about Lisp is harmful because it is likely to be misinterpreted and become misinformation in the eyes of those who not so well informed.

The Lisp community still has to deal with nonsense like that the execution of Lisp programs is slow because linked lists are continuously being traversed, or that the only data structure is a list.

Think about how you might be playing into that. What do you think it looks like when you say that you can't write a hello world, without using linked lists.