The interview is looking for one very specific type of engineer: a frontend specialist with demonstrated experience with a broad range of web technologies. I s

The interview is looking for one very specific type of engineer: a frontend specialist with demonstrated experience with a broad range of web technologies. I see lots of full-stack and generalist engineers screw up frontend development because they don't understand the choices they need to make or understand the consequences of those choices. They lack domain knowledge. Sure, you can Google a meta tag, but if you never knew it existed in the first place you're going to walk into a performance, security, accessibility, or SEO edge case. It's a domain where a good developer with experience is going to outperform a great developer working from first principles. I usually dislike interviews that focus on trivia. But I also see a lot of people who wouldn't dare disparage other engineering specialisations belittling frontend as trivial. Yes, everyone can and should do frontend engineering, but it is also a domain full of gotchas where esoteric and hard-won knowledge can be valuable.