I can tell you the reason for the continued use of leetcode (or similar) at my company. We started giving junior candidates a leetcode-ish test with a low bar f

I can tell you the reason for the continued use of leetcode (or similar) at my company. We started giving junior candidates a leetcode-ish test with a low bar for passing to screen out really weak programmers. Everyone who passed went on to on-site interviews. Interviewers complained about having too many interviews to do. So the recruitment team just cranked up the score required to pass. Bingo, less work for interviewers. Sadly everyone who makes it to an on-site is now a competitive programming enthusiast who is probably a really poor fit to actually working in software development. Many people are vaguely aware of this problem, but nobody has a strong incentive to put in the work to come up with anything better.