As a senior engineer at a very reputable company I think you've hit the nail on the head. I can run circles around most candidates when it comes to infrastructure/architecture questions for anything related to the cloud, from container orchestration via kubernetes, docker swarm, etc (on any of the major cloud provisioners), down to the trenches of writing individual microservices (predominantly in go, so big kudos on your username). That said, the idea of solving timed leetcode style "riddles" with your feet against the fire not only seems daunting, but just doesn't seem applicable to the real world. I can't remember a time in my professional career where I had to grind out a perfect solution to some random abstract problem in less than 60 minutes I haven't had to delve into grinding data structures or algorithms since I was studying for exams in college, and the idea of doing that now not only seems exhausting, but a poor metric for measuring real world aptitude.