There’s actually a name for this. People tend to call it a low level design interview or a machine coding round.

It’s very well established, at least here in India. Non-FAANG companies tend to ask this more often.

I definitely think it’s a much better measure of a Software Developer’s skills than a typical Leetcode style interview.

However, working at a FAANG I have come to realise that the output of machine coding round is not normalizable across tens of thousands of candidates.

Leetcode style interviews work because they’re a proxy for an IQ test, and the outcome is black and white.