sometimes feels very sad about this since one's value should be reflected by the awesome projects he has done. I think it's just laziness of the FAANG companies. If the interviewer is well prepared and keeps digging the resume, then he should know the candidate is good or not. But by leetcoding, it's simpler for them, just keep asking the repeated questions.

From my personal experience, a company wants a "yes man", someone who will do as they command. From their perspective, if you can't pass (or refuse!) the coding challenge, you're already in the red flag zone. That's just how it is.

The funny thing is that a single fairly large personal project will develop your engineering skills 42 times that of the hundred something leetcode problems you solved for your FAANG interviews.

One teaches deep long term critical thinking. The other short term critical thinking. You won't see any small short sighted systems out in the real world.

I understand why FAANG does it. The problem is that other companies are just cargo culting.

I think that if your hobby projects will be important for many people: i.e. you develop something with the importance npm, or Ruby on Rails, or Vue.js, FAANG companies will make you offers without asking you leetcode kind of questions.

This is not true. Not so many people can set up popular and awesome projects like npm or vue.js. These are top level programers. But for other people you can not say they are not good enough to be qualified.

I read that the guy who invented Homebrew still had to go through the leetcode interview at Google (which they failed) so I'm not sure if they ever waive the interview requirements?

Somehow I don't imagine Ken Thompson willing to answer leetcode questions. If anything, he should be the one doing the asking.

they look at your resume in any seriousness after you pass leetcode rounds,