It's super easy to filter for that though. Just change the problem slightly. If they give the rote answer you know what you need to know. It does require that you know the answer though. :)
I get that. I only do medium and easy problems for a reason. Hard problems are hard and I want to solve it over morning coffee. :)
Then again, I'm sure all of my leisure activities are a waste of time on someone's metric.
I probably learn more from the comments than the problems though. People post lots of interesting idioms and it's interesting to me to see how others codify various standard algorithms. Especially across languages.
I have my war stories too. It was fun but frustrating. Definitely not as productive as today.
Early 2000s internet was kind of like that too. The web was huge relative to what we had to work with and there wasn't the kind of products/services available then so asking leetcode stuff had a logic to it.
Admittedly, that's not where we are now for most programmers so it makes sense that the interview process should adapt.
In general: One needs to get code on the device for this attack to work.
But, in many demonstrated cases, one doesn't need to get privileged code on the device, which is an important distinction. And in other cases this type of monitoring was done without direct access to the machine, for example by examining the intensity of LEDs with a camera. Admittedly that's within eyeshot, but it's not direct access either.
For this ESP32 attack in particular, it's not clear how it would work without full control of the device.
You would think things like spread spectrum clocking and low passing power would thwart this attack but really it just means you need to take a larger average and computers are really fast.