She's right about everything, but nothing is going to change.

The elephant in the room is that the industry (made up of mostly men) sees a talk or blog post with this exact information every year or two, and chooses again and again to completely ignore it. I have to therefore conclude that the reason leetcode is still popular is because there's more truth to that joke answer "D" than we'd like to admit. Gatekeeping in this industry is real. It's a male dominated industry, and what you see across SPECIES on this Earth, is that the males of a society are constantly in competition with one another- for better or worse.

I've had a surprising number of interviewers (all men) who seemed higher ranked than they should have been- and they always, ALWAYS knew it (think "Architect" with only 8 YoE at a large company). You could tell they knew they were frauds by how they interviewed and what kinds of questions they asked. These engineers are incredibly dangerous because they will prevent the best talent from joining your organization by giving their thumbs down on candidates who they perceive to be threats... Of course if this person made it to Architect, that means someone even higher green-lit their promotion so it's probably an indicator of rot (e.g., cronyism and nepotism) that reaches the highest levels of leadership and you wouldn't want to work there anyway. Our industry is broken, our hiring is broken.. but it's willful ignorance at this point.