I skimmed the article but didn't see it go into details about the testing environment. Are they essentially conducting a technical interview? Whiteboard coding

I skimmed the article but didn't see it go into details about the testing environment. Are they essentially conducting a technical interview? Whiteboard coding plus the machine learning meme? Because I'm not sure that the numbers in many other countries would be much better. Haven't we all pretty much reached the conclusion that these types of tests are very ineffective at gauging or assessing technical talent?