I am searching for work, but these are largely asked by recruiters of me. It usually goes 0.5) Call with recruiter 1) coding test 2) call with 1 - 3 other people 3) Call with CTO or something 4) usually there's some other call

I've started saying no to these though

When I was searching for jobs I got the best offers from companies that didn't require code interviews nor they required too many meetings.

Well, that gives me all the more reason to try and continue to avoid these tasks. It is genuinely distressing though how many mediocre companies are adopting these horrific interview chains. More often than not starting with some multi-hour coding task before speaking with anyone worth speaking to. It's pretty bad.

I had someone hiring a web/app dev position and they had me make a 2D platformer game for a coding task... I still have no idea why.. It was some education startup trying to find someone to write socket code. They were really nice but by the end of it I wasn't super stoked on coding tasks.