So, as someone who went through the process and got through it (so is less inclined to hold a grudge):
> Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory.
AIUI you can get easily 5 or more of the pre-screen questions wrong and still proceed to the next stage, depending on your experience and how wrong you are. The point here is not that you know each and every one of those things, but to show that you are, in general, knowledgeable enough to spend Engineer hours on.
And your judgement of these questions is seriously impaired by the fact that they are written down wrong. I assume, that the author of this post has written down a rough transcript from memory and as such it's colored by their own (mis)understanding of the question and whatever got leaked from memory in the meantime. The questions he wrote down are, at the very least, not verbatim the ones from the checklist given to recruiters (and there is a strong emphasis on reading them out verbatim there, so I consider it relatively unlikely that the recruiter didn't do that).
> It's formed of the dozens of posts that appear every year about how someone who seems qualified is turned down for spurious reasons like "being unable to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard". It's what makes this particular post so believable - it fits the stereotype.
Exactly. You are reading "dozens of posts every year" from disgruntled interviewees who got rejected and are pissed. On the flip side, a quick internet search will tell you that Google gets on the order of millions of applications each year, meaning you don't hear from >99.99% of applicants.
There is also the widely advertised fact, that the Google hiring process accepts a high false-negative rate, if that also means a very low false-positive rate, so it is to be expected that a good percentage of qualified applicants still get rejected. It is thus also to be expected, that you hear from some of them. Meanwhile, again, you are not hearing from the thousands of qualified applicants that do get accepted each year. Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me a good offer" blog post won't draw a crowd on hacker news, even if it was written.
> How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?
Let's not ignore the responses from Employees that don't think there is a problem.
From reading this post, I'd say a likely reason for the rejection is, that this person wasn't being particularly pleasant. Frankly, he comes of as kind of an arrogant prick. And, as a general rule, engineers at Google, just like everyone else, don't particularly like having unpleasant people on their team. And I also believe this post has gotten enough upvotes, that someone will look into the situation to see what went actually wrong here.