What has your experience with take-home interview project expectations been?

Very curious to hear what others are seeing. I've only taken two in the past two years:

One claimed it should take 4-6 hours. To deliver what was expected in the doc, I spent 12-16 hours on it. Messaging through the rest of the process was that the team was genuinely impressed with my work and ability to deliver on expectations, and their lead engineer had tons of questions around my thought process. It seemed like the expectations were NOT to deliver everything, even though communication implied the opposite. I was greeted with a lowball offer several days later.

Another claimed it would take 1-2 hours and provided Codex API creds to use. The assignment claimed I didn't need to pass all test cases. Of course, this feels like a trap and building something readable with AI tooling that passed all cases took me 5-8 hours. Will be receiving feedback on that shortly.

Am I slow or are these companies crazy? None of these estimates are remotely accurate, and giving applicants the freedom of imperfect code is no real freedom at all. I'm appreciative of interviews that don't pressure me to solve a LC med-hard in 25 minutes but this feels bad in the opposite direction. Have your experiences been similar?