It's also not about thinking creatively all the time. When I did interviews at a FAANG, there were many interviewers whose questions ranged from understanding basic CS to inventing new algorithms in specific circumstances. Generally, the second set of questions rarely had optimal solutions that took longer than O(n), and the first set of questions had answers that come out of a CS textbook.

In other words, the first set of questions is about doing normal tasks in the normal way, and the second set of questions is about solving relatively simple problems in a way that scales up massively.

When you are doing something that has a well-known optimal solution, your colleagues will expect it to be done in the well-known way. They don't want to have to read through your "creative" code to determine that you are just doing a graph search in a different way than they are used to. Engineering at a place like Google isn't about doing cool things: it's about doing things that are kind of cool in a way that a mediocre CS grad from a high-ranked school can understand and extend your solutions.