This is a great point. Reading code is such an important skill and how most of an engineers time will be spent. The ability to reason about code that was written by someone else (including your past self) and update/expand it in a clean/maintainable way is a better indicator of success IMO then writing a little chunk of code that solves a brain teaser.
Read code, explain what it does and discuss how you would expand it to add additional functionality or fix a bug. I feel that would be a better approach than most of the current leetcode style interviews.
In the Netherlands it was about €75, filled most of the paperwork out online although we did have to go in to the KVK (Chamber of Commerce) to complete the process.
Always happy to see more new Swift projects pop up, especially on the server side. It's great watching the language evolve and continue to add more powerful features.
As a long time baseball fan, the "punishment" is a joke. This is one of the worst cheating scandals in baseball history and Rob Manfred (Commissioner of MLB) basically gave a slap on the wrist. Every team/player in the league would be willing to trade this "punishment" for a World Series title.