I agree to some extent, here are some that don't do these interviews [0]. But unfortunately, I find that all tech companies and strangely non-tech companies are trying to normalize the coding interview tests. Pre-interview challenges are useless, since a candidate can easily cheat them by searching-copypaste-refactor the optimal solution from another computer into their own editor and submit it as their own. Doing this easily fools many assessment tools all the time, despite their 'machine learning detection' claims.
But nowadays, it is the on-site interviews which is the new normal. But depending on the sort of company you are applying to, I would ask questions on where they actually apply them or use them in their so called 'engineering challenges'. FAANG, large banks and several fintech companies is certainly justified. 10-15 employee startups based on a mobile app? Hardly. I would expect that larger companies that have their own technologies, programming languages or libraries will ask these coding challenges and if an interviewer cannot justify the use of these questions other than 'to see how you program' then I just end the interview gracefully.
I would instead ask the candidate to send a link to some relevant open-source projects or significant contributions that meet the technologies I am using. No silly hello-world/git-flow/test projects. I can easily eliminate 90% of candidates by checking that you have a patch and are mentioned in the AUTHORS file of an open-source project, which is more quicker than these programming tests designed to hopelessly find πΆπ’ ππ«π π¦π’π«π± π©π’π€π’π«π‘ π¬π£ πΆπ’ Υ΅Φ π΅ π‘π’π³π’π©π¬ππ’π―.