Often you don't even get to the interview step. One time I had a take home that said you could either do frontend only, backend only, or full stack. I decided to pick the backend only one and complete all of the optional backend tasks to make something pretty well made.

Then they email me back and said the other candidate did the whole thing and they aren't sure if I know how to style a page now because I only completed the backend part.

The problem is not that there is choice, it's that the choices don't make sense and overlap in weird ways. Apple presents a lineup that can be described as "good, better, best" while Windows OEMs have 20 models, all overlapping where one has a hinge that snaps in a year, the other has a defective trackpad, the other is the same thing as a another model but designed and manufactured in another country. You'd have to become fully invested in learning the companies products to understand which one you actually need and what the flaws of each model is.

It's like a restaurant that has a 30 page menu, where many of the options are bad, or cooked from stale frozen food from the back of the shelf. Fewer good options are better than numerous poor ones.

I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you.

So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.

They do seem to be an LLM bot from comment history

You'd still burn through IDs. Eventually the people selling their ID would just end up blacklisted from signing up for new accounts.