"Adding additional requirements which test a candidate's ability to refactor code" is a pretty good exercise. And it's ok to force candidates people down a specific development path. The problem is that the interviewers didn't do this. They let the candidate pick a strategy the interviewers weren't expecting, then were disappointed with the results.
Actually we have no idea why the interviewers rejected the candidate. Maybe they were just as impressed with the solution as I am. Maybe the candidate presented poorly in other ways. Maybe they agonized over hiring this candidate vs someone else who was even more amazing, and could only afford one.
Ghosting the candidate is pretty inexcusable. But maybe it was just old fashioned corporate dysfunction and someone dropped the ball.
You do not need to waste 45 minutes of someone's time on whether they can correctly interpret and execute some joke requirements -- this is absolutely not the case. I interview a lot of people and most are bad programmers, despite having impressive resumes. 45 minutes of a progressively difficult programming exercise is a minimum.
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All that said, there are red flags that make me question the veracity of the whole thing:
* Author claims to speak English very poorly, but writes incredibly well! Maybe they leaned on LLMs, but this seems pretty good even for an LLM.
* Author says they have 2 years of work experience in a company that doesn't use Typescript, but then proceeds to create a solution ad-hoc that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system. Certainly not impossible, but I don't know anyone that could pull this off.
* Author doesn't have a name. There's no contact information. I don't even know if I should write "he" or "she". Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.
* There's nothing else on this domain, no link to a CV, nothing. It's a ghost.
The story is too good. I'm defaulting to skepticism.