Not sure that is something I would personally enjoy. While I understand you must fit in, having this process highlights that leaving your current company is even riskier as you might not make the cut and end up with nothing. The trial is one-sided, with all the risks for the new employee, not AppSumo. I understand that any change of job is similar where you may stay forever, however, saying that way make it worse somehow.

Second, basic math still that you never or rarely use or with very large time between usage might get rusty. You may understand the concept but not find the optimal solution. The way you are responding here shows quite a lot about how you are short sighted by instant-failing someone with a single question instead of trying to asses the whole person as much as you can. On you side, you are wasting opportunity to have a great person that could be a key player in your team by bringing other set of skill on the table.

It is not a silver bullets but it has advantages like self-documenting (Playground), ease of discovery on big API (generated documentation with types) and can have TypeScript type generated for your (reduce the number of interfaces/types to maintain).

Federation is also a good concept if you have many teams that need to converge into a cohesive API gateway.

Overall, if you use it properly it can be a great tool.

Good way to get a very echo room of single way of thinking with strong bias. But I agree that it is way faster without the friction of different point of views.