My take on it is that instead of spending most of the initial interview getting the candidate excited only to disappoint them afterwards, it would be far more h

My take on it is that instead of spending most of the initial interview getting the candidate excited only to disappoint them afterwards, it would be far more helpful to give them some offline material beforehand that they can read / watch and then use the interview to get a strong feel of their experience, abilities and interest in the role. In practice, hiring managers are biased to present an overly-positive / exciting view of the work that the new hire will actually end up doing and it's so demoralising to start a job with high expectations only to be disappointed soon after. Personally, I completely refuse to do any form of live / timed coding test but might accept a homework assignment with a very generous deadline if I feel it's well aligned with something I'm willing to spend personal time on, assuming that they're not satisfied with what I already have up on GitHub (although I'd expect a good explanation for why that's the case). Otherwise, I'm more than happy to discuss past projects, system architecture, API design, development practices and so on.