Look, as much as you might want to believe you (and everyone else in the industry) are geniuses, the fact is that we memorize a lot of stuff that were painstakingly invented or discovered by great minds in the past.
If that is "don't need any actual skill" according to your dictionary, then so be it.
As you implicitly admitted, "code monkeying" is a skill. Whether this skill "matters" is really the hiring company/team's business, and none of yours.
what you fail to see just like most other engineers is that it is being used to discriminate and as a tool for keeping compensation under control.
I'm also seeing that given hiring leetcode-trained code monkeys seem to be working fine for the FAANG companies that practice it, perhaps they don't really need that many "real engineers" that can come up with creative solutions to problems. If that's the case they're just hiring the kind of people they actually need the most, and the accusation of "discrimination" doesn't really hold.
Anyway, what I originally objected to was your allegation that reading books and learning standard solutions don't allow one to acquire skills and your attitude that applying standard solutions is something beneath you. I totally understand what you're objecting to (I find leetcode style questions sub-optimal, and when I'm on the interviewer side I don't do it, and that's a competitive advantage for me when everyone else is competing sub-optimally), but unfortunately I am not quite sympathetic to somebody who thinks to familiarizing oneself with standard solutions is beneath them.
The fact that this is the majority of business problems these days doesn't mean that no engineering is happening. IMO what actually is "not engineering" are the emotional, gut driven processes behind the software at some companies. No due diligence is done, requirements are scant, novelty frameworks are used, testing is a joke, etc. Anything resembling engineering is usually an accident in such places. I'm not saying process light environments are "not doing it right", I mean places that do nearly everything in an arbitrary, cargo-culted fashion.
You learn the basic patterns, then you refine and combine those over years. For an outsider, this then looks like magic / creativity.
A lot of people, especially those who don't do Leetcode or work in a company that asks such questions, think Leetcode should somehow relate to the work and are annoyed, but it's just a test like any other.
It teaches you absolutely nothing about the rest of the job, around comms and leadership, which most of the time are more important than your ability to solve puzzles.
It selects for people who want to get in and want to grind.
To put it another way - do you have an opportunity in leetcode to say the value of solving a challenge isn’t worth the time invested?