>Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.
This comment and those further down (particularly doubting the data) suggest that you're experiencing strong cognitive dissonance. There are, I'm sure, hundreds of engineers on HN that can testify to exactly how much FAANG pays and in which metro and how little experience they had (not including LC) before they started.
The claim that hiring is broken has been constantly repeated since ~2010 and yet all of these companies somehow, despite hiring all of the wrong non-CTO people, are still alive and are in fact thriving. Like I said: given how consistently these mantras are chanted I'm just curious what you're expecting to have changed since the last time a post like this was made (you did say "every time I see..." so you've certainly seen many). It's a little like that episode of parks and rec with the reasonabilists where they keep predicting and amending the date of the end of the world.
Don't take this the wrong way, but, having helped several people through the interview loop at FAANG, my experience is that it is frequently the ones that see themselves as above grinding LC, that have the hardest time making it all the way through. And I don't mean wrt wrestling with how tricky some LC problems are (most everyone struggles with eg DP) but with marshalling the discipline and patience to actually do enough to do well during the interview.
It has been said before but my personal experience reflects this: it is of absolutely no surprise to absolutely anyone that those that can grind LC fare much better once on the inside and facing the sheer abyss of complexity of FAANG systems.