A take home without actual feedback is a complete waste of everyone’s time. Who cares if you get a taste for the job in the process. You spend a weekend, the company spends 10 minutes.
We don't time our WSTs; it adds cortisol to the process that defeats some of the purpose of simulating what actually working here is like. So, it is the case that people can end up blowing way past our expected time budget working on things. We're not going to stop people from doing that; it would be hard to do, and we're also excited to get candidates who teach themselves stuff as they go. We're up front about this.
From my vantage point, this process is strictly better than conventional interviews. It demands the same amount of time from candidates, but allows the candidates to pick where and when to spend that time.
There is a lot of understandable enmity built up against "take homes" because firms have added them to their existing interview loop, so they become just another hurdle candidates have to clear before running through the same interviews they always have.
With respect to feedback: at some point in our process, we do start giving feedback. It has not been my experience that it is as appreciated by candidates as people on message boards seem to think it is. We've gotten to the point where we try to do a decent job of explaining what the best submissions have in common, and leave it at that. This kind of feedback is more than I'd ever come to expect from conventional interviews, so I'm at peace with it.
Finally, at to again be candid: we got a huge flood of candidates for several roles, and while for the most part we kept up and gave timely responses to people who submitted challenge responses, there have definitely been ticket mishaps that caused people not to get responses --- in other words, we've ghosted people. I fucking hated getting ghosted when I was applying for jobs and am mortified by the fact that we did it too. What I can say there is: we've never done that deliberately, and when we've caught that happening, we've gotten detailed feedback out quickly. So if the premise of your comment is: "submitting a code challenge and then never hearing anything back at all, even so much as a pass/fail, is bullshit", then yes, I agree, it's total bullshit. Not OK at all.
(With respect to the coding challenges we're talking about today: the public ones aren't a part of our hiring process at all! They're just there for people who are interested in them. We do have a related challenge Kyle and Ben worked on, as a post-L3 leveler. It's not a small challenge. But: any candidate that gets that challenge already knows they're getting an offer from us, so we're comfortable making it ambitious).