This is exactly the point!

If they actually aren't looking for people who just cram CTCI or leetcode, coming to this answer from first principles is demonstrably far more difficult than you'd expect achieved in an interview.

Which becomes forgotten knowledge in about 6 - 12 months time after you've last needed to apply it, depending on how often you'd have to use that information.

These sort of questions have an incredible recency bias, and have zero relevance to engineering competence.

I have a theory that these q's legally favor recent grads without having any explicit requirement to do so. Helps them filter for young, freshly-trained students who they can mould into whatever they like inside of the FAANG-bubble.

> These sort of questions have an incredible recency bias

Of course; how else do you do back-door age discrimination?