I know this isn’t popular on HN, and maybe things are very different in places where education isn’t free, but I’m fairly certain we aren’t the only country to do this.

The jobs themselves don’t usually need much CS knowledge, as you point out, but the degree is an entry point because it gives employers a certain form of safety. I know, I know the HN mantra of “weeeell you can get a CS degree and suck”, but the reason practices are like this in my region is because the companies who followed it did better than those who didn’t.

There is MOUNTAINS of research at Google which cannot be shared externally that shows -- despite all of our efforts -- we are hardly better at selecting candidates through interviews than flipping a coin.

There's also a ton of research by Amos Tversky at the Israeli Air Force that suggests similarly. That's where Google got the idea to try to measure this, and how we got our "strange" interview process.

Except that this practice will be dropped in the next few decades in many parts of the world, particularly in the tech industry.