Sometimes there aren't any docs. Sometimes the docs are wrong. It's important to be able to establish what the actual running situation is.
They all insisted that it was essential to have a CI/CD process but didn't even know what the "CD" part even did. Apparently you just "git push" and the code magically gets on the server. There are many ways to do deployments and a CI/CD process isn't always suitable and can have many forms, in my opinion, but I was happy to discuss any and all. But it's difficult to do that without the basics. As you said, before I was commissioned the platform had no documentation, was crumbling under tech debt and failing constantly so something like getting on the server to at least figure out what's going on was essential.
They asked me to double check that part because they assumed I just hadn't done that part, because apparently I was the first person who didn't need help with an SSH tunnel.
I suspect this is AI’s doing, but cannot be sure. It’s really critical that technical interviewers weed out the over-inflaters though, now more than ever.
# ip a
# ss -tulpn
# ps aux
# df -h
# apt install lnav
# journalctl -f | lnav
Mind you, my job title is MD, so I get that luxury.