Please be civil.
Posting multiple job listings targeting different salary ranges isn’t a “hack response”. It’s literally how you hire properly without a crystal ball to predict exactly who will apply.
Again, no company is going to drag candidates through interviews for jobs that don’t exist. I don’t understand why anything thinks that’s the case. Interviewing is work for the interviewers, too.
This happens all the time. The team will have an internal candidate they want, but HR dept is worried about optics of fairness, so the team is forced to put on a show by interviewing people who have no chance of being hired.
They didn't cut down on the process, or the five stage interview processes during the last two years of over hiring, they doubled down on them.
There are very few careers where entire industries like leetcode, hackerrank, coderpad etc have been founded to promote the practice of making every Dev slog through a mass of made up crap intent on wasting the time of everyone involved to make HR feel like they've achieved something.