As others have mentioned, I find the "limit yourself to 2-4 hours" BS. I can stand up a new http server in 2 hours to implement some API, sure. Adding unit tests, integration tests, a readme, build instructions/scripts, containerizing it, adding detailed comments, linting... generally not possible to do in 4 hours unless you have everything set up before then (I can't use my normal dev tools to do takehomes because they're through my employer). IRL you would generally scope this as a week-long task even for experienced employees.

Maybe if I were unemployed and desperate for a job I'd suffer it, but most places I'm interested in working at ask whiteboard/design problems anyway.

In my experience as an interviewer fishing for specific answers is what makes you miss the best engineers.

I used to do this during my peak Dunning-Kruger phase and gave relatively poor marks to an guy who later proved to surpass both me and the rest of the team in every aspect that mattered - even though originally he barely made it through the interview process.

Chiefly, he didn't do things the way we expected because he prioritized.

There is a risk here for something that even really strong intermediate programmers fall into where they take a very prescriptive approach to programming so they tend to not understand things built from first principles and also tend to overvalue things like future-proofing and abstraction. Since you don't mention any specifics it's easy for people to fill in the blanks here and assume that at least a good portion of the things you refer to are those kinds of things.