Comment by martinbooth

The questions are designed to allow an interviewer to get as much signal in the 45 minutes spent in the interview.. that's why they're contrived rather than your typical piece of work. They're not designed to test you on something you would never encounter though. If a company is asking these kinds of questions and the job only ever requires dealing with npm packages that shields the engineer from this complexity then they shouldn't be doing that in my opinion. But most of the companies asking these questions are in the business of building software that requires this lower-level knowledge