The other poster said it's just a question to easily filter out applicants who aren't paying attention, and it seems as good a method as any. Say "just a cup of coffee" and move on. If the interviewer continues to talk about breakfast or other irrelevant stuff, then I'd just end the conversation. But they can have one for free.
But on the subject, I have no idea how companies manage to screw up their hiring process this much. I used to sometimes interview and hire people and found it to be the easiest thing ever, and I never had the need to do these weird games or more than a phone interview to find great employees. How hard is it to just focus on the exact task of the job and find a candidate who understands it and has a good attitude?
> And that's something interviewers are looking for.
I understood this answer to be part of the written application, in an interview I would just classify this as pointless small talk and just answer something.
> Just the fact that you're ready to go all-in arguing about a detail
This is HN, sir. Going all-in on detail is part of the culture.
Honestly for dealing with job application spam, this sounds like a neat way to handle this, but without that context, it is just weird. Also it seems to be obsolete against people using LLMs for these applications, I expect them to be able to just invent an answer for that question just fine.