I'm a very senior engineer who's actually pretty good at these sorts of questions still, and I 100% agree with you.

I had an example three years ago where I was being interviewed for a job interesting other engineers!, one which paid quite well. And yet when the interviewed me, they had a person easily twenty years my junior who was reading questions off a screen.

Worse, their process relied on a strict time clock. They gave me some trivial question, which I knocked out, then a harder question.

I came up with a good answer to the second question, but then the third question was, "Use the answer for the second question to..." and I groaned - had I known the third question, I'd have done the second question in a very different way.

I eked out an answer - I could smell myself sweating. Initially they told me that I had failed, but a week later they told me something different, perhaps because they had failed all the senior candidates? I told them I wasn't interested.

And I'm good at this shit! Which skill, I might add, doesn't really tell people whether I'm good at my actual job, which almost never has such puzzles, and when it does, I get to think about them overnight at my leisure and they occur as part of a bigger picture.