Here's the thing: "But we do deal with this stuff at Netflix," is still only true for a tiny fraction of the engineers at Netflix. I currently work at a company

Here's the thing: "But we do deal with this stuff at Netflix," is still only true for a tiny fraction of the engineers at Netflix. I currently work at a company that is not quite FAANG scale, but almost is: we have issues in our platform and systems that have forced us to adopt "FAANG-like" solutions to certain issues of scale. Almost none of the engineers at this company are doing anything at all with interview-style algorithms and data structures questions. There are a few working in a couple of areas, but for the most part engineers are working on protobuf specs and implementations around them, front-end/other client code, etc. I'd estimate less than 5% of the engineers here even touch the internals of algorithms and data structures ever, and maybe 10% of them deal with them anything close to "regularly." The specific team you were being interviewed for might have this apply, but the claim that "Netfix" (as a whole) deals with these issues regularly is almost certainly an exaggeration (at best). These interview questions generate poor signals and are best seen as hazing ritual/ego stroking exercises.