> What's the point of seeing if someone knows data structures and algorithms they won't be using if they can't write a web application that interfaces with a SQL database without doing queries in a for loop?

Isn't this the basic architecture of a node js "event loop" Cms that gets content from a rdbms? ;-)

  # pseudo code
  While new_user_request
    query_db with request parameters

I know it's not what you meant, you meant do the above, rather than:

    # pseudo code
  While new_user_request
    query_db for user data
    query_db for session data

    For parameter,
        user_data,
        session_data
        query_db with each item