Disclaimer 1: Opinions are my own, not Google's.
Disclaimer 2: I interviewed with Google twice, and I was hired twice. This might bias me.
Are we talking about interviews by FAANG, or interviews by startups that cargo-cult FAANG? In my experience as a candidate (twice) and as an interviewer (O(100) times), I was never asked, or asked, the kind of Leetcode question people love to hate.
The questions involve a whiteboard, yes; and they involve reasoning about algorithms and writing code, yes; and I don't see anything wrong with that. I see people putting down whiteboard interviews and people almost proudly saying their job consists of gluing together fragments of StackOverflow code they don't fully understand, and that just won't cut it at a FAANG, so you need to know what kind of candidate you're dealing with.
The most complex my go-to question gets is very basic recursion and very simple caching. A surprising fraction of the candidates I interview, who always have a nice-looking CV and have gone through recruiter and phone screening, can't do basic recursion and basic caching. I'm not asking a trick question, you don't need to remember an obscure factorial formula to find the optimal solution, none of that crap.
Recursion and caching. Table stakes, IMO. You can get away with not grokking recursion and caching for some kind of role where you can copy-and-paste StackOverflow answers and random tutorials, but you probably won't do well as a SWE in a FAANG where you're handed a vague feature request and you're expected to deliver a feature that will be used by a billion people by the end of the quarter.
Not saying that every feature requires recursion, caching, and complexity analysis, but these kind of skills are a good indicator of whether you're the copy-and-paste variety or the build-something-new variety, and it's important to know which one the candidate is.
Now if you're interviewing for a startup whose product serves a small number of users and you're asked the tricky gotcha Leetcode questions for no good reason, sure, that's dumb. But don't hate the good use cases just because the cargo-culters get it wrong.