Strongly agree with most of your points. It's a MASSIVE pain in the posterior to be job-hunting. You effectively take on a second part-time job doing interview-prep and everything else in your life gets put on hold - vacations, weekends, quiet evenings with your SO. Woe betide those who have a kid during the process - you might as well stop job-hunting until you're able to get more than 5 hours of sleep every night.
I don't advocate memorizing solutions because I don't think it sticks. I prefer to look at the solution and implement the algorithm myself. Pattern recognition is key though. And I too believe that most interviewers who say they're looking for "thought process" are full of shit. Partly because the question always seems easier to the interviewer and than the interviewee. But mostly because all the candidates who did grind through hundreds or thousands of leetcode, hackerrank, careercup and/or topcoder problems have skewed what normal interview performance looks like.
I don't advocate memorizing solutions because I don't think it sticks. I prefer to look at the solution and implement the algorithm myself. Pattern recognition is key though. And I too believe that most interviewers who say they're looking for "thought process" are full of shit. Partly because the question always seems easier to the interviewer and than the interviewee. But mostly because all the candidates who did grind through hundreds or thousands of leetcode, hackerrank, careercup and/or topcoder problems have skewed what normal interview performance looks like.