My experience with consulting jobs is that while the interviews themselves are still difficult, they do not require nearly as much of this "devote your life to studying and taking practice tests" that the tech industry is enamored with. Consulting interviews are almost all behavioral, and sometimes require a short case presentation, but even the case rarely requires days and days worth of preparation. Yes, there are some who do prepare endlessly (like "Cracking the Case Interview"), but I know far fewer people who go that route and even those that do still spend only a fraction of the time on it compared to leetcoders.

The mindset during consulting recruiting seems to be more of "we want to make sure you have a decent base level of knowledge and problem solving skills, but if you don't know how to code/make a PPT/whatever, that's fine, because we can teach you that stuff". Big tech recruiting seems to be the opposite: even when big tech companies claim "you don't need to know everything, because we'll teach you", they still require you to jump through these leetcode-style hoops to prove your skills.

And this is echoed beyond the hiring process too, in my experience. Consulting companies hire smart people and want to keep them for a long time, so they invest a lot of money into training those people and attempting to keep attrition down. FAANG on the other hand seems to care less about attrition (sometimes even embracing it, eg Amazon) and wants to hire people that require minimal training, and thus wants people that have immediately demonstrable knowledge so they can be immediately productive.