Yeah; I think the whole "coding tests" thing is very much a Silicon Valley thing (which has of course been adopted by some non-SV companies, but its not the norm). I feel bad for HN readers who live there and that's all they know.
The best advice I've ever heard about interviewing is that you need to mentally reframe it from "I need this job" to "they need me, convince me to work here". A big part of this is building a network and finding jobs through that (which is how everyone has always found careers, mind you); when you're introduced positively through a third party the team trusts, the conversation inevitably biases more toward the team hunting you, not the other way around.
And if you can't do any of that then you should probably be happy that companies do big project coding/design interviews that give you a deep chance to show off your skills. Over half of what teams are looking for in candidates isn't the hard skills; its social aptitude, teamwork, networking, the soft skills. If you don't have a network and had to land this interview via a lowest-common-denominator recruiting page or email, then at least you can dazzle them with a great project, but you're already starting out behind.