If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

While PRs may have been used to correct style, that shouldn't have been their only or even main purpose. That's on whoever was using it that way, not on the concept of reviews.

mass effect 2 is my favorite game ever. it is all about putting together the team, and ensuring you work with each one of them to get their whole loyalty.

each member is a badass, in their own regard. it’s also a video game and it’s linear unlike real life. but the mission is super important to me.

and when others have their own passions they want to express and carry out via fulfilling the mission, that’s super key imo.

so far it’s worked out fine. people get the fast firing thing. they know if someone isn’t onboard with carrying out the mission they also don’t want to be burdened.

like we are seriously helping people in an underserved industry. it’s insane.

i hate working with mids and bads, they are going to bring everyone else down. so i want to work with the best people i can get. they don’t need to be MIT grads paper weight types. they just need to be mission oriented and focused.

If you would ask someone to write a piece of code, and a part of the problem is this conversion, then you would be right to expect they reach for a library, but even if they don't you would be giving them the opportunity to explain themselves, and judge the explanation, not the answer. Also, if your test is "does this person reach for a library at the right time", you could do a lot less esoteric and confusing by just asking them to add 10 days to a date. If you just ask this one specific problem, it is likely they assume you are looking for them to demonstrate the skills involved in actually solving the problem, i.e. leetcode.

This is also why some people give you the blabla answer, because it is indeed very unlikely that someone needs to do this legitimately. This is because its a toy problem. Someone's professional reaction to the problem in isolation should indeed be: this is weird, I've never been asked something like this, what's up?

Finally, even though the question is terrible, I would still rate the "whatsup?" response higher than the "leapyear" response. I would want a developer to triple check that this problem needs solving, before they would solve it themselves.

Finally finally, if there's one answer to one question that, when answered trivially in a way literally taught in most basic programming courses (use the standard library / a third party library), makes them a "guaranteed hire", I also have significant doubts about the level of talent you are bringing in, as any experienced interviewer will tell you that qualified people will get important questions wrong, and unqualified people will get important questions right.

I understand that this reaction might be quite harsh, and I know better than anyone that its hard and time consuming to do good interviews, but please consider that you are rejecting people who may be very confused and sad by this way of rejection.

Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value.

We have seen this before when big data started to be a thing, tons and tons of reports being auto-produced weekly (or even daily), but even if they contain relevant information they are low-value because no one can take action on so much information.