From the POV of the large tech companies, it's mostly a matter of keeping the interviews short since the questions can be complicated yet fit in under an hour. The top companies are constantly growing, have ~3 year turnover and are flooded with applicants due to their name recognition. Why all the smaller ones copy this approach, I have no idea. The alternatives usually are just as unpalatable: pair programming, a long project, language triva questions, etc. So nothing changes.
I used to play the pipe organ before becoming a software engineer. Bach's works are like living inside of a multi-threaded algorithm in real time. You can understand/appreciate a lot of them from a high level without knowing what they really are doing as implementation details. Some people even can play his pieces just with muscle-memory. But if you try to fully understand as a composer what he is doing in any piece, it's this astonishing, unparalleld depth that just keeps giving over years and decades. I just realized something new from a movement of piece I've heard for 15 years now the other day, and this happens regularly.
They are starting to take into account area of expertise, like in the article, they offered 2 Android-specific interviews as a different process. You'd still have some algorithms, but at least the other 2 would be for embedded if that was your area.