Not GP, but "esoteric" might be a less useful term than "not a great idea". I agree with what you've posted elsewhere with "knowing what you don't know" in order to check your assumptions, but that's very different than knowing the exact answers to factoids which--while useful to know about--may not be feasible to memorize in their entirety. That doesn't mean they're esoteric, just that there are a lot of them.

For example, if a candidate responded to a question like those you ask with "My hunch is that they would evaluate to $answer, but I'm not 100% sure of that: I can never remember the whole JS boolean-equivalence table, so I'd look that up to be sure. May I do so now? Also, if faced with that situation at work, I would, within reason and with testing, try to remove code that relies on rules like that--which I recognize are common, but still consider a very high-risk bug surface--in the area in which I was making changes", would you consider that an unqualified candidate? Or someone with perspective?