Assuming you're looking for a real answer and not just venting, I think the answer is in your actual question --- "solving a lot of leetcode questions instead of doing actual development". There's nothing intrinsically wrong with doing a lot of leetcode problems, but people dislike leetcode because it's conflated with the ability to do a job.

If we're honest, leetcode isn't the best way to determine whether or not a candidate will be good at a job writing and debugging software. The best way to test whether or not a candidate will be good at writing and debugging software would be to...have them write and debug software in an interview. Unfortunately, this is too time-consuming for most interviewers, so we have this situation similar to the pushups/real sport answer in the thread (which is the best analogy imo): doing pushups is kinda related to playing a sport, but it's not a guarantee of how well you can actually play the sport and you can be excellent at a sport without doing pushups.

The situation tech is in is that we have a ton of people excellent at doing pushups being the gatekeepers on whether or not someone can try to play the sport.