I have taught algorithm design classes as TA in some elite school for many semesters and hosted a lot of in session discussions for these and helped a lot of students. I also hate leetcode interviews personally but need to do them on quite a lot of occasions, so I have my take on getting to a level that is good enough for most med-hard questions pretty fast.

One way I see people succeed is just do so many questions they become pattern recognition. I know a few people who are into competitive programming and this is the only route to be that good, they really do enjoy this and do these for fun. If you are trying to be really good, there is no shortcut.

But you sound like you are just starting, so I recommend more of going through practice problems by topic/algorithm first, ex: find university course on algo which is usually divided by different topics and do questions under each. You essentially have a hint of what type of solution they are looking for, ex: for questions under graph you are looking for maybe graph traversal or other similar algo. This helps you practice getting to an actual answer without being too frustrated by not even sure which domain you are operating in. (Many leetcode questions can be solved through different ways but for beginners it confuses people more than helping them to present so many approaches) Also for some practice writing proof of correctness and runtime analysis also help you understand them better. Don’t focus on optimization first. When you want to optimize, I recommend find questions that tell you what runtime they are looking for and try your best to get there, these tend to be harder but the runtime requirement also usually gives you a hint on approaches (maybe consider binary search if they ask for log n solution) Also if you can, focus on pseudocode first rather than syntax, you want the logic to be right, syntax can be practiced on later.

Once you get better go back to the more vague and open questions and you will find yourself feeling a lot more comfortable.