Given that top dollar can mean potentially a six-figure raise over median salaries, that doesn't exactly seem like a bad deal.
All things considered, Leetcode is remarkably accessible relative to the barriers of entry in other high-paying fields like law, medicine, certain finance careers, and so on. It's a mostly-free website that you can work through at your leisure from the comfort of your home, with plenty of Google results to walk you through the questions if you run into a problem.
Have you spend some time on Leetcode already? I could see how the questions could be daunting to new grads, but I didn't find it all that painful with several years of industry programming experience.
Don't get discouraged by the sheer number of Leetcode problems. You don't have to do them all to get value out of it. The key is to do a couple per day in your free time (lunch break, while you eat breakfast, whatever). Any consistent practice will add up over weeks or months.