(I do the interviews at our company, but I'm just a regular dev and not in management or HR or anything like that)

I get where you're coming from, and I've tried to fight to get people paid to do our take homes because I also feel it's only fair if we're expecting them to spend ~3 hours of their own time, but you also end up in situations where people will do the interviews just for the money. We had a small trial run with a pretty laughable sum, something like 40 bucks just to test the waters and see how people reacted (this was for a very high paying role, mind you), and we got a staggering amount of people who clearly didn't care at all about the role and just wanted the free money. Like literally would just post a link to a random repo or whatever, completely unrelated to the takehome, and you as the company don't really want to be in the situation where you argue with candidates about what constitutes a "real assignment" for the purposes of payment.

It's one of those situations where a handful of dickheads can ruin a good thing for the decent folk.

At least personally, I dedicate as much time to reviewing the takehomes as the candidates themselves put in. I write extremely detailed feedback covering every single line they present us and we supply that feedback to candidates regardless if we're moving forward with them or not. Also importantly, in the candidate gives us an actual assignment, we always move them through to the discussion part of the interview, except for cases where the assignment was basically not done at all or was egregiously terrible. I feel mixed on this one, because sometimes it's clear from the assignment that chances are slim for the candidate, but I've also seen some pretty bad takehomes end up with super strong hires at the end (and vice versa!) from the discussions.

HR even tells me that a few candidates reached out and wanted to thank me personally for the feedback I gave them even when they didn't end up getting hired, so at least from what I can tell people don't mind the way we do it. I personally fucking hate doing interviews, regardless of which side of the interview table I'm on, so at least when I'm the one doing the breathing-down-the-neck thing, I try to make it as good of an experience as I possibly can.

IMO it's the fairest interview method, and the one I personally prefer to do when I'm the one interviewing (as in, when I interview for jobs). In my experience it's always been pretty obvious that the takehomes aren't for any actual work (obviously I can't speak for everyone here, I'm sure it does happen) and it's always a pretty made up scenario that is loosely tied to what the domain is. I know that it can be unfair for people with a lot on their plate, at least I've been lucky enough that 2-4 hours out of my week is pretty doable, and especially compared to something like leetcode (which most people still have to study for, so the 2-4 hour thing is pretty moot IMO) it's just incomparably better. I've tried doing "just talking" types of interviews, but there are a lot of good bullshitters out there, so there has to be some type of actual programming just to weed them out.