These questions are basically fizzbuzz for those who have done the work. But you'd be surprised how many people do things for absolutely no reason.
The downside is people tend to hire them anyway when they flunk the technical interview but have excellent leetcode score. One is fairly subjective, the other is objective, and people tend to lean towards the subjective one. You can work around this by having two technical interviewers, but they have to be fairly senior enough to trust.
The scale is fairly logarithmic, like a 8 might be 10 times better than a 3. 1 is hello world, 2 is being able to debug something with stack overflow, 3 is your fizzbuzz tier of being able to chain three concepts together, but not able to build anything without help.
And then there's the Dunning-Kruger peak. Most evangelists are like this. They're very excited for a technology, but you find that they have no practical skill in it. Very often, they misunderstand the concepts too.
etc etc
Edit: I help with hiring at the company i work at, and i like using open ended questions
I'm not against open ended questions, but making them should be a privilege the boss grants to well-intentioned employees.
That biases it towards people who are good talkers. Sure, communication is a point. But sometimes, you interview someone in another time zone where it's 9 PM or 6 AM or before a lunch break after an exhausting half day. They'd just answer something dumb like, "Uhhh, if I was stuck and needed help, I'll ask...?"
There's also people who are bad at spoken English, or have some mental block - have difficulty talking on zoom with camera on/off. There are those desperately need the job and end up using "safe" LinkedIn talk, where they refuse to badmouth the people who killed the last project, and refuse to admit that it was also partially their fault, so they just end up sounding sus.
I'd say the way around this is to ask something that's partially open ended. Like "How would you solve this problem?"
Nobody I’ve ever interviewed with has used LeetCode style problems as the only factor. You need to create a hiring process that has a multi-faceted interview process and evaluates the person’s entire work history, abilities, and communication during the interview.
Definitely happens.
Checked my solution at Leetcode, top 5% of performance in Java.