The candidate also has their share of non-face time: Grinding leetcode and filling out HTML forms that are asking for the same information contained on their resume.

Your comment made me wonder how much time I've spent in face-to-face interviews over the last year of job hunting. It comes out to 7 percent of all of the time that I spend applying to jobs. For every minute that I spend in an interview, I spend roughly 14 minutes preparing for it in some way (or applying to a different job).

Perhaps I can get more efficient with my time, but as you said, the process is naturally inefficient as it stands already.