> In my experience, asking a question that demands one to recall specific details about a painful event in an interview, which is typically a stressful situation, may produce poor results.

Stressful and painful are not the same. Every engineer is going to go through stressful situations. Good ones will learn from them: to minimize the risk of them happening, and to better cope when they do.

> If you want to see how a person handles stress, give them a situation that is stressful in a way it'd be on the job

How is this any better?

> "apologies in advance for the following situation, which is intentionally stressful..."

Stressful situations don't send calendar invites.

I'm not arguing one should be an asshole during the interview. I've been interviewed by clearly hostile engineers. I didn't like it, and it surely impacted my performance. But real life is like that. Being able to react in a polite and composed manner to an unexpected situation, and recover from it, is a superb data point in an interview.