Much of these hiring practices are just a self-perpetuating narrative. Just spreading the news that interviews at your company are hard is a way to discourage unqualified candidates. And candidates that don't want to put up with your (perceived) bullshit.
Either way, the choice of playing the game is entirely on us.
I used yED a lot at my previous job and I found it to be quite clunky in several cases, sequence diagrams above all.
Also it doesn't look very slick, and learning how to properly tweak object props is not immediate. I often resorted to MS Power Point for quick and dirty diagramming.
With that said, it's just good enough for a free product, though it doesn't have any special edge over some of the web-based alternatives out there.
A very impressive feature IMO is automatic re-arrangment. Typical use case, when you want to draw complex activity of class diagrams when, e.g. following some legacy code, or just brainstorming ideas, it's easy to end up with a very tangled mess of shapes and arrows. yED has this magic button that rearranges the graph in a smart way, mostly based on direction of edges. And suddenly your diagram looks sane again. Kudos to them for this.