Yeah, it makes sense to me as a sort of moneyball approach, to cheaply hire skilled candidates who are not as good at the standard evaluation process, are likely to have few competing offers, and who are willing to do extra work on nights/weekends.

Agreed with this. I wouldn't take a 4-day weekend to do interviews and a homework assignment unless I was desperate or already out of a job.

From the perspective of someone who already has a job in the industry, I'm really not going to want to do more than one interview per week anyway.

This format also doesn't appear to want full days: it should be an hour or two Friday afternoon, plus a half of Monday. Two part-days isn't really that worse than a full day off (Mileage may obviously vary; particularly the mileage to get to the interview). The initial interview could also very easily be done remotely.

Even if it is a bit higher-impact, I would still prefer it simply for the greater quality of experience, and that's before throwing in the payment.

I feel like it's in the best interest of the employer to leave the choice of tools fairly open and see what the potential employee elects to use. For the example given in the article (a basic web application), I'd be very interested in whether the interviewee decides to go with a heavy stack, does it completely in vanilla JS, or something in-between.

I wonder about this. I'm pretty new to js frameworks and I see the advantage when things need to scale or get very complex, and I get that companies use these things. But for a simple assignment like this, is it better to use vanilla js and maybe handlebars, or "show off" that you can implement all the routes and whatnot in Angular, even though that's overkill? Or maybe the interviewee's justification of their choice teaches you that they understand the trade offs.