At the time, I found it doubly strange, since it was one of the most interesting and useful products I'd seen, and because everybody I met at that company had the energy of a Steven Wright monologue drowning in molasses.
Since then, the company appears to have pivoted pretty severely (new business plan, new logo, new offices, etc) so I'm not sure any of it would have mattered at all. Hiring in software is completely broken.
But large companies care much less. It's much more important for them to find a person who will be effective with their well defined processes.
If your mission as an early stage startup is to disrupt the yoga industry for example (no offense to this industry at all), then you might quickly run out of options in terms of product/mission fit if you only use a whiteboard as your primarily evaluation tool. I really believe the hiring process is totally broken because it's not taking into account the ability for candidates to learn and the business impact they could have on a product. It's all about what they know in the moment and what technologies they've worked with.
I often have ideas along those lines but they are not usually welcome. Improvements of that nature are supposed to come from product manager/designer, not a jira ticket machine AKA dev
Besides the usual 15 minute monologue from recruiters trying to do keywords matching, briefly talking about the company (you can google most of it). I can't remember anyone asking me about my vision regarding any products I worked on during the interview process. After that 1st phone call it's not about the product or the company anymore, it's all about testing you like a college kid getting ready for an exam. Now it's about you wanting to join their team. Not them trying to convince you to join.
What would be a solution? Hire people who care about the product, not only the company logo. It's cool if you know how to write a function in order to find the shortest path in a graph. It's awesome if you love using a pen on a whiteboard. How about asking you how you could improve our product? What problems do you think could be solved within a specific industry? So, looks like the hiring process has to be completely re-written.