I realize that the study was specifically talking about brainteasers, but I wonder if irrelevant algorithm questions have a similar motivation? I was once asked at an interview at a FAANG company to come up with an algo for finding the longest palindromic subsequence (!). At another I was asked to get all partitions of an integer (https://www.whitman.edu/mathematics/cgt_online/book/section0...).

I'm pretty certain I'd never be working on problems of that nature as part of the role.