Begs the question, if they don't, shouldn't they still get familiar with CS? Honestly, how hard is it to read Grokking Algorithms?

Look, I think the dev hazing ritual that is current hiring processes sucks, but Algos and Data Structs are the language that we speak. We have to be familiar with them.

I don't have a CS degree. But I know the freshman algorithms. It's the basic tools of the trade.

I don't. The ability to figure out how to write BFS still seem pretty basic to me.