Bit of a necropost, but - I agree with most of your points, the thing is, that palindrome question worked out because 1) You had a "realization", which still

Bit of a necropost, but - I agree with most of your points, the thing is, that palindrome question worked out because 1) You had a "realization", which still feels a little "there's a trick to it" to me, which can be a sign of a bad whiteboard Q, I think. Obviously, this is fungible. 2) More importantly, your interviewer didn't suck. They understood the process is what matters, and not the code on the whiteboard. That #2 is the reason I think whiteboard coding is bad. Most interviewers simply aren't trained well enough to evaluate based on process rather than results. That's why I advocate for only doing very simple ones, or not at all, simply because it's less dependent on how good the interviewer is.