I think an element of it is that you can have unambiguous questions with SQL, which taken to the extreme do fall into gotcha territory. I was an interviewer fo

I think an element of it is that you can have unambiguous questions with SQL, which taken to the extreme do fall into gotcha territory. I was an interviewer for a business analyst & data science team recently and we needed to hire several analysts & data-scientists who had strong SQL skills because 90% of the data manipulation/processing used SQL. I was definitely aware that this limits who we hire, but we were very short-staffed and needed people so it was easiest for us to hire people who had a good understanding of SQL. That said, we did not care about syntax subtleties, just more if could you generally answer questions using SQL. And for the data-scientist role there was a lot more than just SQL but it was a useful check.