I've done this in small applications in C (where nodes were already being statically allocated) and/or assembly (hacking on an existing binary).
No idea about the effect on speed in general; I was trying to save a few bytes of storage in a place where that mattered.
The early versions of FORTRAN did not have dynamic memory allocation. Therefore the main program pre-allocated one or more work arrays, which were either known globally or they were passed as arguments to all procedures.
Then wherever a C program might use malloc, an item would be allocated in a work array and the references between data structures would use the indices of the allocated items. Items could be freed as described in TFA, by putting them in a free list.
The use of the data items allocated in work arrays in FORTRAN was made easier by the fact that the language allowed the aliasing of any chunk of memory to a variable of any type, either a scalar or an array of any rank and dimensions.
So this suggestion just recommends the return to the old ways. Despite its limitations, when maximum speed is desired, FORTRAN remains unbeatable by any of its successors.
Wait a minute, I've seen it stated many times that a primary reason FORTRAN can be better optimised than C is that it doesn't allow aliasing memory as easily as C does (what that means, maybe you can say), and that's why 'restrict' was added to C. On the other hand, C's "strict aliasing rule" allows compilers to assume that pointers of different types don't alias the same memory, which allows optimisations.