Quite possibly better. The primary function of putting hoops in front of candidates off the street is to reduce the proportion of existing engineer time spent giving technical interviews that result in a "no hire." Unless you really like interviewing, you may well have a better time as an employee at a company that makes things harder for applicants.
There is a concern that drudgery weeds out the wrong people. However, "we want to hire people who have a strong desire to work here in particular" is a pretty common belief in SV and if you subscribe to it, then some putting the lowest-success-rate applicant pool (online resume drops) through some clerical annoyance makes perfect sense.
I think the resume filtering practices end up filtering out way too high a percentage of people who are actually good at the job and just bad at writing resumes.
A better hoop to force applicants through would be one that demonstrates some aptitude for the job which, upon successful completion, gives them access to the job submission portal/email address.
For example in a customer service role have the applicant play a game that follows through a sample phone call where they have to choose the response they would give to a customers problem.
There is a concern that drudgery weeds out the wrong people. However, "we want to hire people who have a strong desire to work here in particular" is a pretty common belief in SV and if you subscribe to it, then some putting the lowest-success-rate applicant pool (online resume drops) through some clerical annoyance makes perfect sense.