At my last job, they asked me to perform a series of tasks on Excel in order to proceed to the next level of interviews. I hadn't used Excel during my teaching years (we had district programs for record-keeping) so I bombed it. But I felt the whole thing was absolutely stupid, as the tasks they were asking me to do represented about 1/5 of the tasks listed in the job description. I reminded them of that and told them I'm a fast learner and thankfully, they did not let that stop me from moving to the next level. But it felt very manipulative and like a waste of everyone's time.

That's my long-winded way of saying I agree with you that so much of the interview process is nonsense.