Engineers hate LeetCode because it’s “not real-world”, but would you actually survive a real-world interview?

A friend and I got into an argument about this.

Everyone says LeetCode interviews are stupid because “that’s not what software engineers actually do.”

Fair enough.

So replace them with a real codebase.

Here’s a repository you’ve never seen before. Find your way around it, understand enough of the architecture, fix this bug or implement this feature, and explain your decisions.

I said this would be a far better assessment of an engineer.

My friend said candidates would immediately start complaining that the codebase is too large, unfamiliar, poorly documented, uses technologies they haven’t seen, or that there wasn’t enough time.

Basically: “Give us something closer to the real job”, until the interview actually looks like the real job.

Would you choose this over LeetCode? Why or why not?