Well I find conversations with people in interviews to be less of a game than giving them “homework” to do, given that unless they’re totally green with no work experience, I’d assume they would actually have some stuff they’ve worked on and would like to talk about.

It’s completely bizarre to me that take home assignments have been normalized as part of an interview with professional working people.

It's a constant tug of war between standards and expectations.

I personally prefer hypotheticals, or some variant on live pair programming. Also, as someone with enough free time to do take-homes, I also prefer code reviews over that one-off code which then becomes a case of 100% "I did this and here's why".

Even with that last example I would say, "well to optimize, etc., we could do this".