[strstr]

Legitimately, they are often too hard. Balancing the problems is quite challenging.

On top of that, the solutions often make the problems seem much intimidating than they are (not that they are easy). Most solutions involve a lot of “happenstance”, where someone tried something and it got an outcome that was useful, which they build on top of. This makes the solutions look crazy complicated (“how would i have ever thought of this!?”), when in reality they are Rube Goldberg machines built out of duct tape and baling wire.

I’ve only solved a few Google CTF problems, and one of them was the one I wrote, lol. That was nearly a decade ago though.