[dvt]

> I argue "cleverness" is a learned and honed skill by exposure and exercise.

Even if I were to concede this point, it's certainly not honed by the kind of exercise that OP is advertising. We are deep in Max Howell's "invert a binary tree" territory here.

[knollimar]

Doing leetcode absolutely makes your system design better and you don't deploy algorithms you don't know.

Invert a binary tree is kind of a strawman for the absolutist claim that you don't improve the cleverness by practice, but it's an example that not all the practice is useful

[watwut]

> Doing leetcode absolutely makes your system design better

Only up to the pretty low point. After that, it becomes completely absolutely useless. And people collectively spent astonishing amounts of time training that for job interviews long after the "absolutely useless" bar was passed.