I hear this so often that I wonder if people actually believe it. If you do, keep in mind that it would require a fairly large conspiracy within tech circles to maintain. A more likely explanation is that it's less effort to come up with and apply a leetcode-style question in an interview scenario.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by laziness and cargo-culting.

I'll disagree with this one. I'd actually be inclined to job-hop more frequently if I have the skill to pass hard interviews at any tier 1 company, thus maximizing my earnings.

If I don't, I just stay put knowing I lucked out at a great company, knowing it would be hard to get lucky again.

I had the opposite experience, once you grind problems on leetcode and figure them out yourself, you somehow never forget them, esp under pressure in an interview. The problems aren't exactly the same of course but like Polya's book "how to solve it" describes solving a problem by considering something similar you solved, when presented with some interview problem to work through the first things that came to my mind each time were previous silly leetcode solutions I came up with that bought me some time instead of blanking out.

Meanwhile, engineer retention statistics at FAANG companies prove otherwise...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...

Last I read, the average tenure for an employee at FB is about 1.5 years... Could be different at other place.