Usually those lists are intrusive -- their nodes are meant to be part of larger objects. They will be freed in other contexts, e.g. if protected by RCU, memory reclamation is postponed until all threads have quiesced. Or the nodes are allocated by one amongst many allocators (i.e. for performance, or better concurrence), so it is best for the structure itself not to make any assumption about where the memory should be returned to.

So generally, list implementations in C will not free the node, only remove references to it and return it.