Yeah, I've been there and done that. I'm sure that people justify it by assuming there will otherwise be cheating on the take-home.

In practice, I take jobs that don't require demonstrating anything technical in the interview.

But a take-home test would only add information, not take anything away. So there is no reason in principle someone couldn't use it to hire.

There is, if they want to hire strong candidates in this competitive market.

A candidate like that will have 10+ companies trying to recruit them. Out of these, 9 will require 1-2 hours of remote screens at most for an onsite. The 10th will require a 5-10 hour take-home project for the same onsite.

Which one will the strong candidate skip?

I don't know, but if 10 companies are competing for one employee, then the 9 that inevitably fail obviously were using the wrong approach. You can't point to the similarities as evidence of the correct strategy, because by definition the differences were probative.