> 2) if you have thousands of applicants for a position, and probably a dozen stand out by passing a really tough bar, wouldn’t you want to find those dozen?

It's a reasonable assumption, but you might not. If the role doesn't actually require those skills you might hire someone who's going to get fed up and leave in 3 months or (worse) who invests time in making their job more interesting instead of solving your actual business problems.

Good points. Most FAANG/MANGO companies in India do leetcode. And I know Amazon still does leetcode in US/Europe.

So, yeah, you are right. Live coding is very good, which is what I do, but too many people confuse live coding with just leet coding.

The question is, however, whether this is a good proxy for one's future colleague and employee.

I have no idea what could be a better option (well, maybe preparing some small feature to work on together), but it often turns out that good problem solvers are not really great at doing the job, for reasons that have nothing to do with the hard skills.