No wonder tech interviews these days are so bad.

In the emerging points of their business. Or “juniors” with some kind of valuable expertise to the interview.

Not, “just graduated web dev boot camp and have a fleeting interest in web3” junior.

It's certainly possible, more so in the early days, but it's relatively rare that you see a successful company continue to have people with only a year or two professional experience making hiring decisions. If those people have solid backgrounds that approach isn't necessarily disastrous but it'll be limited - e.g. a fresh CS major doing a startup will probably hire people who can create working code, but they're probably going to over-value certain academic characteristics over practical engineering and miss solid candidates or (worse) expose the company to liability. Inexperience can also just lead to things like hiring people who seem like they're someone you'd want to hang out with.

Note also that I would draw a distinction between 1-2 years of total experience and, say, someone transitioning from academia to industry. Someone who was, say, a successful grad student likely also accumulated a fair amount of other life experience that a 22 year old is unlikely to have.

The only consistent thing yet hear about the FAANG interview process is how universally bad it is, but also how you should just play along to get your $300k/yr salary.

I agree, and my experience of interviewing in the big tech has been very varied. Amazon's was the most professionally conducted one.

Inexperienced engineers simply don’t have the experience to make good hiring decisions. Having them being involved in the process is fine, but they should be shadowing someone more senior.