It's not just the big companies anymore. Even the small tech companies offering 80k for a senior engineer position insist on at least 4 rounds of interviews.
They have none of the financial muscles of big tech yet have adopted all their overhead and poor practices.
The small ones I went to interview with, about five of them in total before I decided on my current job never had anything like it. I guess I got spared.
It's possible you got lucky, but it's also possible we're comparing apples to oranges. What sort of jobs and in what market? I'm talking about full-stack, frontend and backend web roles in the USA.
Well, mostly what people would call full-stack I guess. But not in USA. I ended up in the vehicle industry and wear a lot of different hats currently. I guess I could call myself R&D but honestly I'm just a developer that does every part of the chain.