Not the OP but yes absolutely. At medium sized USA companies it's common (not universal) for new team members to be discovered and or interviewed and or hired by the team that they will be working with. HR/recruiters are just trying to feed the interview pipeline. Possibly the at-will nature of USA jobs feeds into this. Bad hires are less risky without long term employment contracts.

I'm interested in your experience as well. Even at the largest US orgs there's still the concept of a 'hiring manager', who leads a small team, has a big role in hiring, and can can do meaningful technical work on the system. So the interviewing ability of these people, and the people that they trust, is the main determinant of the engineering hiring decisions that get made. Like a common interview loop would be hiring manager, (2x)senior/staff dev on the team, senior dev on another team, director. Lots of exceptions and opportunities for random consultants/reorganizations from above, but the basic idea of line employees and managers being able to identify their successors is pretty baked in around here. Can't speak for the east coast though