I think that's fair. I've had both the former and the latter, but unfortunately most of my experiences fall into latter case, where it's simply been hoop jumping. Most of my friends (all about to graduate, so a good number of examples) are experiencing the same.

For example one company gave a problem with five parts, with the final part being solve longest path on a bipartite weighted graph (which is quite a hard and time consuming problem). After that, the next step was a phone technical screen, then an on-site with 4-5 more interviews, most being white-boarding. It was basically hazing instead of an evaluation criteria.

An alternative is my last job, which had a take home test that took about 6 hours, but that was the whole technical part of the process. Being on the other side reviewing them, the problem absolutely gave enough information.

I totally get there's a right way to do it, but like most interviewing trends, companies seem to just be adding this as a step instead of revamping their process.