I thought this as well. You probably have some number in mind where you'd walk over coals to get it, right? This is like that, except the barriers are tedious to endure rather than physically painful.

OTOH, if you get an offer and you feel queasy about things, you can have the all-too-rare-in-life privilege of asking impolite questions and maybe getting a real response, e.g., "The way you made me jump through all these hoops makes me think that the company culture might be rigid and dysfunctional. Is it?" And then see what happens!

Nice idea. I'm thinking of offering to complete a take-home project or go through some of my open-source work line-by-line

BUT, i have no idea if they're willing to agree or would just drop me after that altogether

Some company's interview pipelines are aggressively documented and standardized. The goal is that everyone gets at the level they're supposed to, backed with evidence for why that decision is made.

If you're completely breaking the process, it may harm that, leaving you either:

* as a Senior / Principal that isn't actually ready for that kind of work in their specific area and their specific software type

* as a level 1 or 2 that absolutely could be a Senior / Principal and now you're going to have to crawl through their ranks slowly.