Asking engineers to innovate on the product side is the same as asking product managers to invent better programming languages.

There is such a thing as a proeuct-minded engineer, but FB's interview process does not select for them.

But your original post said:

> I still, after all these years, hold the belief that facebook failed to innovate because the engineering interview is based on memorization. Having worked with those types of engineers, they can absolutely build exactly what is needed.

I think the fact that so much engineering innovation has come out of Facebook absolutely disproves your thesis. Also, while I've interviewed for Amazon (but not FB), I don't think Amazon's technical interview questions were really any different from any other big tech companies I've interviewed at. They certainly didn't seem to optimize for any sort of "innovation" in their tech questions (to be clear, I'm not sure how you'd do that).

Amazon is much easier from a raw algorithms perspective, but much harder from a behavioral interview perspective. I used to work at Amazon and conducted over 50 interviews. Amazon selects for a different personality type than Facebook. It's also true that alot of interview rejects at Facebook get into Amazon

How did react change the web?

Creating highly interactive web applications is far easier using React (and the surrounding ecosystem) than using plain Javascript.