As a developer, I understand this perspective.
But, from an employer's perspective, resumes tell you very little about a candidate and are essentially worthless. The sole usable metric we get from them is years of relevant experience.
We respond with a questionnaire that gets us more uniform answers about experience and technologies used.
Assuming the above doesn't filter the candidate out, we move on to a 90 min max "take home" exercise. In our case, it's not a coding exercise, but that's not that important for this discussion.
Only if all of the above hasn't filtered out the candidate, do we move to a Zoom meeting. In the Zoom meeting, after an initial introduction, we do a few easy coding exercises. Like, reverse a string or sum the integers in a file easy.
A few notable things from this experience:
1. The number of candidates who struggle with the Zoom interview coding exercise is surprising. It's a lot higher than expected and almost all of our candidates at that stage have 2+ years of professional development experience.
2. The number of candidates filtered out by the "take home" exercise is very high. 85+%
We literally don't have enough time to talk to every candidate that applies with the right amount of experience. And, even if we did, many/most candidates on the market aren't good developers. Our signal to noise ratio is already bad. In that case, it would be terrible.
As a developer, I sympathize with your perspective. But you may be passing on some good opportunities by not being willing to "play the game" a bit. Some employers are indeed bad actors and/or terrible at hiring. But given the current market, even those making a valiant effort to do it well, due to sheer volume, are usually going to have an exercise of some kind.
We post our salary ranges up-front, don't want to waste anyone's time that way. We also put a ton of effort into a very detailed job description and application process. The hope is that the candidate can see the effort we put in and will be willing to reciprocate. If that doesn't end up being the case, we assume, like you, it probably wouldn't have been a good for anyway.
FWIW.