There are also a lot of engineers out there with 1 year of experience x 10 (or even 20 times), or even 20 years of experience with some narrow niche technology that no longer applies - but want to be paid like they have been keeping on top of things and learning broadly for 20 years.

A solid experienced engineer is worth their weight in gold. A lot of folks consider themselves solid experienced engineers who couldn't program a hello world in any modern computing environment. This is quite unfortunate, and more chaff to sort through.

Not defending leetcode. At least it shows someone is trying?

Which is normal.

Many companies pay for raw skills, ability to learn quickly, ability to hone their skills, attention to details.

If you can ace leetcode, topcoder, codejam, and alike in a short period of time, you probably have a very high capability of learning.