[lk145]

The problem is that irrelevant whiteboarding questions are far more the norm than relevant whiteboarding questions. Most companies interview this way, so if you avoid those companies you avoid nearly everyone.

I'm a full stack developer who specializes in front-end. Knowing how to structure a front-end app, knowing/following JavaScript best practices, and understanding the arcane idiosyncrasies of JavaScript are in my opinion three of the biggest values a front-end developer can add. However, the companies that assess this stuff in interview are an extremely small minority. I usually get questions about binary trees.

It's partly because it's more difficult to assess those ways of thinking in interview, and it's partly because linked list kinds of questions are just the way interviewing has always been done, so people keep doing it.