You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title

I have interviewed many people. I have never once been impressed by someone figuring out a convoluted way to force a round peg into a square hole. The people I recommend are the ones who question why I would want to do something. If need be, I can always follow up with "but what if you had to do it this way." But for a question meant to evaluate technical ability, I am going to ask you how to do something which is a best practice. If I'm asking you how you would solve an absurd problem, the purpose of the question is to evaluate how you approach problems, and I will let you know that's the purpose of the inquiry.

I'm with you on this as an interviewer but as an interviewee have had interviewers who clearly didn't like it when I did this or even started to get impatient when I called out different problems than they cared about. There is a really terrible feedback loop around interview expectations.