So what's the alternative? You can talk about work history but now you're locked out of the FAANG track if you don't start with an internship there because very few jobs are going to work at the same scale. Of course you could go learn about systems design at scale but now you're back to preparing for interviews.

You can just sit and chat like you're friends but that's going to bias the interview process to "people who I like" which is just "people who are like me".

I'm sure there are LeetCode questions that are more & less predictive of success but it does have the benefit of removing much of the bias in the hiring process, at the expense of requiring candidates to do some prep work. If you don't want to do the prep work then there are plenty of other places you can work.

I think one challenge in these conversations is that people talk about what the interview process should or shouldn't look like without talking about what the interview process is trying to optimize for. And each person is going to have different ideas of what they should be optimizing for in an interview so they'll have different interview solutions. Then you argue about the solutions but the reason you disagree is because you're starting with different goals.