I'm in my late 50s and after 10+ years at same company I found myself on the job market. 1998 was the last time I had any real interviews - after that point it was all networking with no real tech interviews. After much cursing at the advent of white boarding and code tests, I finally just caved and bought a leetcode subscription and starting working problems I hadn't seen since the late 80s in college. Long story short, After 8 interviews I landed a great job with Big Company. At the end of the day, it's a game. You can play it or complain about it, but it is what it is. Has leetcode made me a better programmer? NO. What has helped though is stackoverflow and github.
It showed that you were able and ambitious enough to learn (re-learn) a somewhat complex skill in a reasonably short time. This seems like a very desirable property to me, and a good substitute for having strong talent or recent experience of algorithm design and implementation.
