FAAANG unintentionally limited its own hiring pool by implementing leet code for their own hiring screens. They accidentally set the bar to high and the hiring process filtered people with a limited skill set that almost always had little relevance for the job they were hired for.

This throttled the market as a whole, limiting supply of workers which drove up TC.

The upside at least is that I can play that game too and optimize for it, and then reimplement the same practice which further limits the supply of labor and benefits my TC at the expense of the company I work for. Win.