It’s been a long long time since I was interviewed for a job, but I have conducted a lot of interviews since then and any signal that the candidate has engaged with the question and has interesting thoughts about it is a huge plus.

FWIW I would never ask these kinds of gotcha questions. I just give simple programming problems and talk through solutions with the candidates, and then throw in complications to the questions to make them more interesting and test more areas of the candidates knowledge and problem solving abilities. Yknow, like what happens on the job every day.