It might have all changed by now, I did my RHCE exam on RHEL5.5 so we’re talking many moons ago before switching careers to development.
There was a written portion followed by a practical portion in a lab where you had to configure services/features, followed by a break where they would mess small things up that you had to troubleshoot and fix.
I had a feeling they were going to break things, so I made sure I installed tripwire on each machine so I knew exactly what files they touched. I was done that portion in under 15 minutes. When I came out, the proctor said "Did you give up?" to which I replied "Nope - got 'em all I believe."
I think they removed tripwire from the available binaries after that :-)
At the risk of sounding like a caveman I have to admit that I haven't sat a single exam in my professional life. Am I losing out on something? What benefits have these exams brought to you that could not have been happened without them? Seriously considering if I should start signing up for them. And if I want to sign up for them, where do I start?
And for an employer it's a nice tick when assessing candidates, it might just tip the scales in your favors vs someone else. However, I recognize that we're very much in a "seller's market", in that it often feels like education or certifications don't matter when it comes to finding a job, to the point where some years ago, people that just had a crash course / boot camp (as opposed to a formal education, bachelor's or master's degree) could land a six-figure job at a FAANG or startup company.
It became a big headache at first and then we had to adjust all our image build process to avoid the collision between the domain and multicast DNS libraries.
1) it looks good on the resume, which can help you get past the initial sift by people who dont understand what your experience actually means.
2) They give you the chance to fill in the gaps in what you think you know. My experience of doing my RHCE after 10 years of professional sysadmining was of the 14 chapters in the book I knew maybe 10 already and had never touched the other 4 because they never came up in my job, and the prospect of a looming exam gave me a deadline and the motivation to actually sit down and learn them, which then paid off later in other jobs that did use them.
3) to test whether you are as good as you think you are :)
If those don't speak to you then they're probably not super important to do, luckily we mostly work in an industry where experience trumps exams.
I'm sure there are lots of places that still use vsftpd though (I have a vague memory that it supported kerberos at least), so it might still be useful for some people
I attempted that exam right before it was to disappear permanently, on RHEL 7.4, but did not pass unfortunately.