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Pretty much! After repeatedly failing interviews for the past year, I've lost hope of having a "normal" dev job again. Studying for interviews took too much time away from things I'd rather be focusing on if I wasn't going to be employed.

I'm now trying to get a business off the ground in a field I've dabbled in for years (game dev), but there's no expectation it'll get me past minimum wage :/

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Right. More and more experienced people are moving into indie / contracting on the side because you simply won't pass these interviews unless you spend ton's of time learning all the tricks.

Depends on the company I guess. Less known companies may either not use algorithmic puzzles at all, or have a lower bar (either the puzzles are easier or you don't need to ace them), just because they don't get to be as selective as Google. I once aced the puzzle coding interview in a well known late stage startup without doing much preparation (I was 10 years out of CS school at that time, so none of the algo stuff was too fresh in my head). The problems just were not that hard - you could simply figure them out with common sense and some basic algorithmic techniques.

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