I also had an 1-hour where i couldn't build the provided code and had to go through maven repos and older versions of the major test component to make it work after a couple hours and then lost any motivation to write the simple exercise.
I also had an honest one once, where the instructions were clear, you will need a full weekend to do it. I liked the job and i completed it, only to be rejected because they didn't like my scala syntax.
Sorry, but i won't take home test again and have to gamble whether it's an actual 1h test or a full weekend one, or some random guy will spend 1 minute only to reject me.
That being said, even if it takes an hour, I still have to allocate 4 hours for it.
It's reasonable to expect someone have various languages on their personal boxen, and maybe git, but not repositories, specialized third party tools, etc. I don't run Puppet at home, for example.
Is not necessary malicious from those companies, they just underestimate the time their test take.
Thats 3-8 hours of your life back.
I did a data science take-home that asked you to scrape some documents from the web, group them by topic, extract some information the clusters, and visualize it. This could be a few hours of work, or an entire research career.
IMO, a good take-home needs to be aggressively scoped. Ideally, I think you'd explicitly ask for --and expect--a "bare minimum" solution and a list of potential improvements. That list would be great fodder for in-person interviews too.