Regarding #3 I think it's a completely broken industry practice and I would not take it on me, but I would try to find companies with different hiring practices

Regarding #3 I think it's a completely broken industry practice and I would not take it on me, but I would try to find companies with different hiring practices. As you described, this whole Leetcode industry is demoralizing and hurts almost everyone for very small benefit in general. In our company (and my previous too BTW) I was strongly advocating working on real problems during the interview. I find it really troubling that the industry still sticks to this outdated way of interviewing (I refer to Leetcode) instead of: A. Having accreditation which would require renewal after X years B. Having other types of competency checks I really don't understand how Leetcode is superior to let's say Coderpad or Codeinterview.io (I am not affiliated with either of them). These tools actually pretty much allow you to set up a relevant coding exercise in the candidate's preferred language and framework, and it only takes a few minutes to customize their templates to the candidate's experience and the interviewer's imagined coding problem. Just yesterday I set up a React coding problem in just below an hour, which allowed me to ask relevant questions about: language syntax, state management, routing, code organization, system performance, error handling, and data organization among others. Isn't that the end goal here? To ask relevant questions from the candidate so that we make sure his skills match the imagined role and/or project? Based on all this above, if I would be back to interviewing now, I would generally take it as a signal of a broken organization, lack of clarity about the role/project in the company, if they would shove a Leetcode/Codility/Hackerrank coding problem first in my face without asking.