Do you have evidence that the standard coding interview works? (There's evidence that it doesn't)
I'm with you that the claim might be too strong to say "this is the way" but that's because I'm of the (very strong) opinion that interviewing is an extremely fuzzy process and there are no clear cut metrics to measure one's abilities in a significantly meaningful way. a̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶e̶l̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶f̶u̶l̶ There are useful interviewing methods but certainly not "the best" method. Trying to just mark checkboxes only leads to mediocre results. The reason we're generally okay with this is because we more often than not don't need rockstars and it doesn't make sense to put a lot of time and energy into this process when we get sufficient results through lazy methods.
FWIW, a typical (non-software) engineering job really just involves high level discussions like the OP suggests but even without the implementation. It is generally about seeing how the person thinks/problem solves and looking at problems they solved in the past. It isn't resource intensive and good enough. Because truth is, you don't know what someone is like as an employee until they are an employee (and even then this is fuzzy)
