Can confirm. I had two jobs in the past which could be considered embedded development, and got both of them after casual (but technical) chats. The first one converted to employment after a 6 month trial period as a contractor. No whiteboard hazing, no leetcode, no take-home "challenges". And the average age at both shops definitely skewed older.

I also got the impression that there weren't a huge torrent of engineers with assembly and JTAG debugging experience banging down their doors, which probably helps.