Better Stack Backend Engineer interview questions

It was my first interview process in 7 years and I don't have too much to compare with but generally I left frustrated with the process and feel like the interviewing is completely screwed up. Now reading the other reviews here on Glassdoor I can see some confirmation of this. The interview consist of the following steps: 1. So called async interview, which is basically a 30 minutes assignment you have to work on with screen recording on (Loom). You can find the question on other reviews, it's about Excel rows. 2. Then there's HR screening, nothing special there, I can confirm other reviews that this was nice and friendly 3. Then there's first technical interview with questions with a company engineer 4. Then there's a home takeaway assignment (takes 2-4 hours). The task is to style a simple one-page webapp with Bootstrap and add a few little features to it. The app is in PHP and uses MySQL for the database. The idea of the app is that some sort of user/contact list -- adding users phone numbers and locations to the list. Also you'll need to deploy the app somewhere on the internet. 5. Then there's 2 more technical and one non-technical interviews (final) with the company C level So the general process took me about a few weeks mostly waiting for bookings of the interview slots. I think the interview design is quite screwed up. I wasted about 4 hours on take home assignment. They pay for it which is at least a bit nice but still feels like disrespect. I waited for weeks just to go through 10 minutes of questions with the CEO and after 3 questions I was rejected. I don't get why they couldn't just group all technical questions in one day and wasting more of your time. If they didn't like the level of my drill of the postgresql reference documentation they could have just done it in one day, not having me to dedicate my weekend off hours to assignments and waiting a week for the next step. Now I failed to answer the CEO's technical questions and was rejected for it. These were some questions about tools and approaches (I'll attach those here). Those were just 3 questions. For me those weren't representing anything possibly important in a software engineer's jobs. The CEO said that me not knowing answers means I'll have to learn too much and thus will take too much time to get me to bring value to the team (paraphrasing, don't remember the exact wording). However the questions were about the concepts and tools which each can be explained just under a minute and can be easily looked up. So the just made the judgement of my knowledge by a very limited set of questions and also made assumptions about my learning speed and abilities having none evidence to judge it. The whole interview process didn't contain anything which assesses what is important in the engineering job, which is problem solving skills, technical and engineering intuition, team work and communication, etc. I have a feeling that their interview is testing the skill of interview passing rather than real skills of a real-world engineer. I'd expect to be judged by how I can design technical solutions, work in collaboration with collegues, track down bugs, rather than on whether I know by heart the technical reference which can in fact be looked up under 1 minute on the internet. This is a small company with just about 10 engineers on board as of the time. Not sure how many were hired through that interview process specifically. Still does not seem to be statistically enough to draw the lines between the process and the efficiency of the new hires. Probably the process is just raw and poorly designed just because the company is relatively young and the management is not too seasoned. It's a shame because the product they are building is quite exciting and there's not that many exciting companies who hire in Europe especially with remote work options. But also makes me questioning the reasonability and judgemnt of the C level of company. They've been doing fine in terms of business so far but it could point to potential issues which are not visible from the outside. The management has engineering background so they might be just not very good with people and HR there in general. So I'm generally quite frustrated with the process but at least I've learned a bunch of new things during the interview and got some dust off my inteviewing skills.