> That, of course, would be absurd. If anyone is actually interviewing people that way, they're doing a terrible job.

Perhaps you have never experienced that sort of interview, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I was once asked a question where the solution involved implementing a trie. The naive design involves a 26-element array to hold all the possible next-letter entries, which obviously takes a huge amount of memory. The interviewer expected me to know the trivia answer on how to avoid allocating all that memory, and was clearly disappointed that I didn't know (using a linked list instead of a fixed-size array: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie#Implementation_strategies). This was a principal engineer interviewing another principal engineer, FWIW. The company was Qualtrics, a survey/customer satisfaction company, not a bare-metal algorithms-heavy company.

Obviously you've managed to have a successful career without encountering interview questions that hinge on algorithmic trivia, and I'm not doubting your experience. But saying "it's never happened to me so therefore it can't exist" isn't an especially strong argument.