> reveals just how formulaic and predictable the response and banter is designed to be

Accurate. Interviews have to be formulaic and predictable. That's how you combat bias in the system.

Kahneman's book on Noise (in decision making) has a whole chapter on interviews. With careful design to avoid bias you can get to about 75% accuracy measured as correlation between Yeses and Job Performance. Without having repeatable interviews judged against a pre-defined metric, your signal becomes meaningless. You're basically flipping a coin so why even bother.

Or worse, you get people passing interviews because they went to the same school as the interviewer or whatever. In that case your un-designed un-formulaic interviews become literally worse than random.