We've found that candidates who better understand how things are connected make better candidates and operators. We need some way to gauge how well they understand how things are connected. This is as fair of way as we've come up with.

I totally relate to that. In the university setting, I see many students more interested in learning keywords instead of “key concepts” behind such keywords. Think of preferring to learn “k8s” instead of “resource manager”. Today, very few of them knows that etcd is one of the key components in “k8s”.

I guess this behavior is similar to the transformation that happened in other non-CS fields.