i'm not claiming that this is a good question for every case. but there are many times where the choice of loop makes a significant difference. asking this question for a task that only requires iterating 3 elements every 1000ms would indeed be quite stupid on the interviewer's part.

it always amuses me when people use these seemingly stupid questions (out of context) to prove how broken tech interviews are. but of course, if your job will be write high perf code, then suddenly they question is incredibly relevant.

to be clear, i agree that there are a lot of stupid questions that get asked which are not relevant to the actual job you'll be doing (exceedingly few SWEs will need to implement a merge sort as part of their job)