Ya, I think we are sometimes actually better off with the generic brain twister questions because the more specialized questions are harder evaluate. Like, my idea of writing a code editor might be completely different from yours because I’ve dealt with different requirements. And if the interviewer is junior enough (or not versed in the specialty), they might not be ready to have a serious discussion about trade offs and design spaces.
Usually, when interviewing people on an algorithms interview, I've asked an straightforward warm-up question, followed by a more interesting second question, that might be difficult for somebody that hasn't thought about anything interesting in 10 years. I don't think there was ever a situation where somebody got through the first just swimmingly, and then hit a wall on the second. The pain always starts on the warm-up question.
Coming from doing research for the past 10 years and now looking for a dev job, I have the opposite feeling: all these interview questions (even the hard ones) are way too boring.
I'd imagine you might want a bit of practice get refreshed. I know what you mean. But I'm guessing it's not a month of practice, and you're not thinking you have to memorize the problems beforehand.
For me, it's a similar background (interpreters, compilers, text editors) and for any algorithms interview, what always got me have been dynamic programming problems and remembering that hash tables exist.
Edit:
Funnily enough, one time on a phone screen, fresh out of college, I got asked directly what data structure I'd use for a text editor. The next words out of my mouth were, "a pair of finger trees," and it turned out that it didn't go well, I didn't get a follow-up interview.