The problem is actually that due to the plethora of tools, languages, dev stacks and other variability, it's hard to diagnose software engineering skills effect

The problem is actually that due to the plethora of tools, languages, dev stacks and other variability, it's hard to diagnose software engineering skills effectively. So it makes sense to go back to basics and use things that everyone should know like data structures. The issue is that this is taken to the extreme.