I have probably done about 6 take home assignments in my 14 year career and 5 resulted in a job offer. In a recent company I worked for I was the hiring manager and we had about a 40% assignment completed to offer ratio. Which seems like a fairly decent conversion ratio, from the average candidates side that would be close to 1 offer for every 2 assignments.
Is there a correlation with people hating on them because the ratio is skewed much less favorably? Do I have too subjective a view? I know there are companies that give an assignment as practically the first step in the process; but I would never engage with that since the risk/reward is weighted entirely in the company's favor (which under the surface, is an even bigger red flag).
My favorite take homes, and almost always what I have come across, are the "build a mini api" ones. I will typically just draw from the structure I have in place in other applications, implement the custom functionality, and do a readme that delves into the philosophy (in a light touch way) of the choices I make. Then the conversation of going through the implementation in a technical interview is generally a relatively relaxed process.