It’s very company-dependent, but most are not wanting a regurgitated answer. If you have a solid grasp on data structures and traversals, you can solve a lot of those puzzle problems. Sure some have tricks, but they’re not completely pointless and certainly don’t indicate anything about the person being willing to “spend hundreds of hours doing meaningless work” or are “good at following orders”.
Not a hiring manager, but of the engineering jobs i've had, school never came up (I have no degree). That said, i've had plenty of rejections without even getting into the interview process. Would a degree have changed that? Possibly.