EDIT: TLDR: There are bigger issues at play at the country's economic level that students take up skills (CP) to get the best paying job possible. This in turn drives companies to make interviews harder to separate rote memorizers from the crowd. I don't see this going away anytime soon and although I agree that leetcode questions aren't the best measure, there is no better alternative as an interviewer to quickly filter out candidates.
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> As a response, college students now pursue competitive programming obsessively to stay on top. In this weird arms race against prospective hires, companies keep asking harder and harder questions in a misguided attempt to raise the bar.
You should understand that more students pick it up because of the higher salary offered in the tech industry in your country (India) and this is one of the best bets to lift themselves and their families economically. To be fair, I don't blame them, majority would pick up ~CP~ because it has the highest returns for the effort put in. It's a fault in the system, not the students.
Personally I would be wary of anyone who says only competitive programming excites them. I feel that testing algorithms and data structures in some slightly realistic situation is the only way to weed out the pretenders.
Anecdotally, I have interviewed screening rounds from junior to senior. The juniors who pretend to like programming are usually filtered out when I change the application of the data structure slightly as compared to a leetcode/geeksforgeeks question. Something as simple as "reverse a paragraph/sentence" as opposed to "reverse a string".
Mid level candidates are the most difficult to filter out and this is exactly where the leetcode type questions come into the picture. They are able to talk about their projects as if they designed the entire stack. I have seen them draw the system design diagrams, tell me pros and cons of the stack/tech chosen, but they would usually fail in easy/medium level leetcode questions.
Seniors are the easiest to filter. We give them the easiest question possible and ask them to solve it. This is done with a huge disclaimer that this is a screening round and that the intention is to see you can actually write code and answer questions about it in real time. Questions are easy array/string leetcode setting them up for success. The good ones just finish it up in hardly 10 mins and move on the the design round following immediately. The bad ones just beat around the bush saying they wont code despite the disclaimer. The really bad ones are ones who cite N yoe so they shouldn't be tested on coding (this is when the senior dev steps in and recommends not to proceed with the interview anymore).
Coming back to the article, unless you have candidates/people who are actually interested in building software, and only when other jobs around you on avg pay a decent amount of salary for the place you live in, I am positive people will do everything they can to get the best ROI to become more sustainable in life. This is evident in > 5 yoe hires when people are in a more stable posn in tech economically and as interviewees they realise what they like/dislike and as interviewers you can discern whether they can actually do the job properly.