its more like real-world hash tables are tailored to the specific pattern of querying and inserting data.
if you know empirically that 80% of your requests come to a tiny subset of hot keys - you make a specific hashset just for these hot keys with constant access time, while keeping the rest of the table cold.
your L2 cache is an example of such optimization - a high bandwidth and low latency memory on the CPU die, that is orders of magnitude faster than random DRAM access - a tiered memory model
if you know empirically that 80% of your requests come to a tiny subset of hot keys - you make a specific hashset just for these hot keys with constant access time, while keeping the rest of the table cold.
your L2 cache is an example of such optimization - a high bandwidth and low latency memory on the CPU die, that is orders of magnitude faster than random DRAM access - a tiered memory model