What you’re describing sounds a lot like ETS except for the compile-time stuff.
The stdlib uses ETS to store graphs (see :digraph and :digraph_utils) because it’s a mutable key-value store that can be shared with other processes.
For a simpler example, here’s an Advent of Code solution from the 2018 problems that uses an ETS table as a doubly-linked circular list:
Each element in the list has an identifying “value” and the values of its left and right neighbors; the list is traversed by repeatedly looking up entries by the first value and then recursively following the links.
For that problem, the structure was really convenient: each update was a fixed, small number of steps way from the previous update and inserted or removed a single element. That meant changing three entries in ETS, versus rewriting every following entry in a map or list.
