But we started this procedure together after just miserable results from "just talking" to candidates. Keep in mind most of the candidates were (and all are now) contractors. We did whiteboarding at first. It didn't seem effective and I hated it anyway. We could only ask very simple things, write a for loop, write any kind of recursive function that counts to 10, etc.
So I setup a project with create-react-app and IntelliJ IDEA. I give a brief intro to the IDE, showing that saved changes are built automatically, and usually reloads in the browser automatically and they just have to worry about the particular fetch call in one case, or adding the code (I don't say event handler) to handle a button press.
The code is 30 lines in one, and 40 lines in the other problem, including braces, imports, etc. I understand how intense interviewing can be but these, to me and our team, are super easy problems.
I've gotten a fair bit of heat for that post, but no real suggestions on how to improve the process.