I applied to one company that's well known in my broad field around 5 times before getting a phone interview. The job was for a developer of scientific software and they were looking for people with a stronger domain science background, not developers in general.
The core of the interview was a series of puzzle questions, some of which were domain questions, some of which were not. The interviewer would frequently answer a question before I had sufficient time to think about it. I could have figured out the answers had they not been fired off in rapid succession. I think they believe these questions are fundamental in some sense, but I'd question the importance of most of them. And scientific software developers rarely need to solve problems 30 seconds after hearing the problem statement.
People say that the interviewee should be interviewing the interviewer too, so after the interview I wondered how they might have reacted if I started asking them some puzzle questions that I think are fundamental as well. I want to make sure that they know their stuff too, right? I bet they would have absolutely bombed that.
I think their process selects for people who memorize answers to questions, as I skimmed the company's Glassdoor before the interview and saw many of the questions posted on there. So I doubt this process is actually selecting the most qualified candidates. Plus, these days I think ChatGPT might do a fair job of quickly answering these questions...