[jokethrowaway]

That's very interesting to hear your perspective!

I applied for a frontend position 1-2 years ago at FB. I thought I was going the Leetcode route so I prepared for that but somehow my application went through as a frontend position (because my CV and OSS is mostly frontend React and then some node.js), I was just asked some JavaScript basic algorithm (nothing you need to prepare for, implement a stack and something else similarly simple) && CSS (which I bombed completely, I certainly haven't used CSS without some sort of abstraction for the past 10 years, I certainly won't get it right at the first shot). I didn't pass eventually.

I have a friend who joined FB for a year (left purely for the stock decline, he was doing fine performance wise) and had a similar experience with zero LC asked.

My wife went through the normal engineer route a few months prior that and got asked only Leetcode.

My friend got hired at Apple as a frontend engineer and got asked zero LC.

I disagree on the perceived hardness, I feel like LC interviews are way harder than frontend engineer ones but I might be biased as I've been doing frontend for almost 20 years. My point is, the reasoning ability you need to have to solve LC (unless you memorise most of them) is way higher than getting the logic right for a frontend exercise. I would not call them "LC style with a frontend twist".