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It's the number of bits. You can change to bytes, but you are just hiding another constant factor of 8 by doing that.
If you have a theoretical computer with single-bit registers, sure. Quicksort is also quite slow on such an computer.
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Disagree. If you think that, what do you ask? "How would you Google or Stack overflow for the answer?" That's hardly going to provide any useful signal. At the end of the day you need to ask something that shows evidence there candidate knows something about efficiency tradeoffs.
Sorting algorithm complexity and implementation is rote-learnt at this point. Hardly tells you much. Traditional technical interviews don't seem to help you find the best candidates (Google famously studied their interview process and decided it was no better than chance). So maybe don't do a technical interview. Or if you do, just take a couple of real problems from work. If you're making a lot of hires, do some res…
Go ahead and memorize, it'll be obvious if you can't explain how you got that answer.