A linked list of each authoritative name in the zone. Not a list of zones.
That's for offline signing. For online signing you can do different things.
But the point is, and that's what this discussion is about is that DNSSEC can evolve. It can get extra features to make online signing more efficient.
The problem is that getting all validating recursive resolvers and other validators to update takes a very long time, on the order of decades.
So we got this problem because people started using this feature without verifying that validator support had spread wide enough.