Is there literally any other field where there's an expectation to essentially do fairly intense studying to pass interviews that apparently have very little to do with day to day jobs? Maybe they exist I've never encountered them. The limit of my "studying" for an interview is to just learn a bit about the company, their strategy, etc. either by online research or by talking to people I know connected with them.

ADDED: I suppose one could argue that the Bar exam is a bit like that but that's a credential as are degrees which are not necessarily all that overlapping with the real world.

I hard disagree with your disagree :)

1. Some candidates only need to brush up to be in interview shape.

2. To mitigate the need to spend time to prepare, simply use initial assessments to get back in shape. That is, apply to and interview at companies you don’t want to work at first to get more practice problems. If you pass, you get the added benefit of more leverage when negotiating your compensation!

3. As another commenter mentioned, as Leetcode style interviews are shorter, there should be a threshold where $prep_time + $leetcode_interview_time <= $take_home_interview_time. Of course, the threshold adjusts up and down based on your initial level of preparedness.

I honestly hate spending 4-6 hours of my time on a pointless take-home, but I suck at leetcode and I absolutely refuse to spend any time on learning it, so they’re the lesser of two evils.

The difference is that you are spending 4-10 hours of your time trying to pass the process for 1 company. If you instead invest 4-10 hours doing leetcode prep, you are studying to pass the process for LOTS of companies. Economies of scale is a huge factor here

Is your 4-6 hour estimate a total of all jobs a candidate applies for?