With a big company like Google you can't just randomly hire someone without putting them through the rigorous interview process that can be months long (been there, done that), accomplishments or not (see the Homebrew dude).
So if John Carmack, Guido, Rich Hickey, Donald Knuth wanted a job, they would first have to leet code like everyone else?
The reason the failure to invert a binary tree story was notable was because the dude invented Homebrew. He was supposed to enter though the back door, but someone screwed up and made him go through the regular mechanism.
To be clear, I am not passing judgment on Oz - I think his accomplishments are impressive, all the more so given his day-to-day challenges. And I'm not at all a fan of the Leetcode interviewing culture either. My point was that Oz is not Carmack, Knuth, etc, so wouldn't fall into the exception bucket that Google cares about (unlike you or me). There are usually well-meaning reasons behind these processes, regardless how well they turn out.
I think his point is that not everything is well thought out or planned. A lot of the time people are just winging it and hoping for the best. Just because some giant corporation does something doesn't mean they planned, thought about or even intended to do a thing and arguing that they must've had teams behind every decision is silly. Sometimes, shit happens.
For this piece of tech, he is Carmack. He is Knuth. He deserves respect for the work he’s done in this problem space, it actually is gaming changing the way it works.
FYI, it is incredibly common to subject acquihired employees to the same interviews, and extend offers only to those that pass. This is especially true at FAANG.
