> The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes

The problem is that this is a 2-way street. The candidate is forced to guess the interviewer's thought process, because otherwise they may be pitching over the interviewers head.

We have to spend a ton of time calibrating hiring loops for this, because otherwise you get staff level candidates being failed by mid-career interviewers who don't understand the full context of the question they are asking (and hence don't understand why a staff eng solves it differently than they would).