Comment by boredtofears

I've spent a heck of a lot more time grinding leetcode than I have working on take-home projects. I always enjoyed doing take-home's because I could really spend time on it and make it something worth showing off - if anything it always felt like the perfect low-stress way to show what you can do. It's amazing how many candidates don't take the time to make it look good (or even meet the objectives in many cases).

Haven't done one since pre-LLM era though and that path seems like it might be completely infeasible for employers now.

That said, the most productive interviews I've been a part of as both employee and employer have always been with the technical people that you'll actually work with and conversational in nature. You can learn a lot about what someone knows by listening to their experiences and opinions (but this depends greatly on the quality of the interviewer)