My reasoning is that the company advertised a position for a senior engineer with 4 years experience. Leaving aside title inflation and whether someone with 4 years experience is actually a senior engineer, and leaving aside the really dumb test, that position requires communication skills, common sense, maturity, and just generally knowing what's going on. A candidate who misreads the situation in an interview so badly that they can't take the interviewer's unsubtle hints is going to mess up other communication within the company, has likely never been on the other side of an interview before, and is at risk of allowing the kind of "clever" code that destroys companies.

Again, this is only a problem for a senior engineer. I want junior and mid-level engineers to be clever and enthusiastic. Senior engineers are meant to understand that I have five interviews this week and their attempt to channel Aphyr[0] is going to make my life harder when I want to talk about their thoughts on maintainability.

[0] https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview