Honestly, I think it's a sign of the times. We might be at the peak here. I have recently interviewed at a couple of "AI" labs at banks and some MLE positions at insurance companies and one startup, and they are all requiring leetcode. Most of them have asked dynamic programming questions and expected working solutions in 20 mins. IMO it's a sign of higher supply than demand. I think it's about to get much much worse with many companies moving to remote work, meaning we are competing with folks in countries like India (no offence meant here, it's just a product of the education system) who are much hungrier and will literally do every possible Leetcode problem out there.

I think we are about to experience a tech bubble bursting type of situation (especially given the over inflated valuations + ridiculous stock prices of FAANG), meaning much less jobs, much higher competition and a whole world of pain, which will result in many folks leaving this profession (especially those with little experience and with no real formal education).

Now with the emergence of things like GPT-3 expect further automation of annoying software dev tasks and a lot of front end roles transforming or going away entirely. I think future devs will need more ML exposure and experience as that will become a standard part of the job soon enough, and we might enter an era of growth after the bust with much more ML integration into products and new companies forming around that.

In 5 years, the world of software dev will be a different place.

In the meantime, take a vacation, relax your brain, understand that most of us are getting rejected and it has little to do with our skill, and get back to leetcoding if you want those high paying cushy jobs. Use the smaller companies who insist of pretending they are FAANG as practice, and aim for FAANG my friend.

That's the best advice I can give because I feel the same pain and that's what I'm doing.