Not only theory crafting during interviews but a lot of real life design is driven by what's known as resume driven development. The worst part - some of that is later presented at large conferences as successful and go-to solutions.

One time I was working in a body leasing company and our team was hired by bigco for an internal project. Two months earlier an internal employee was tasked to research the project and develop a prototype. When we started all major set pieces were written in stone. Month later said employee left. When we later checked the job listing he likely applied to our tech stack mirrored that to a letter. He got free training, a resume and a new job. We were stuck with these decisions for 3 years.

Another time a local branch of another bigco was trying to carve out a major piece of internal cake. Head-of was hired, team was quickly ramped up and they started cooking their foothold. Then a series of major power shifts happened couple levels above our pay grade and another branch came out with competitive strategy. We had a 2 days long internal brainstorm involving 50 people to come up with arguments and strategies how to defend our approach. We bet on blue, they were selling red. Life's were at stake. And many truly believed that blue was the way to go, and red was a recipe for disaster. Two days later we had a rock solid presentation that was trashing red approach. But if course most of these decisions are not made by nerds and middle mgmt do eventually the company placed their bet in red and the whole dept became redundant. No one likes to lose their jobs, so our blue head-of quickly turned his cloak and the team became an outsourcing provider for the winning team. What makes this story particularly funny is the fact that the head-of immediately started campaign of conference presentations where he sweard that all his life he believed that red was the future that will eventually trump blue, and any competition that is still using blue is destined to fail in short future.