As others have said, they are looking for reasons why you need somebody with advanced degree/training/experience for the job. How the applicant's degree will be used on a day to day basis. For example, given a transcript, how will the experience from the courses listed be used? Provide details for other employees with the same job title. For example, if the roles and responsibilities include production support, provide ticket counts and some summary info. An example "day in the life" for the job, task by task and hour by hour. The RFE guidance will differ because it is a recommendation from your legal team on what you should provide to get the application through.

Technical ability alone does not qualify one for an H1b visa. You need to be above and beyond what is able to be sourced in America. Specifically, the skills need to be so advanced that you cannot find any American workers to fill the job.

I imagine this test would discredit nearly every H1b software hire.

Usually is a request for more documents. A few days ago USCIS published two new rules where they can skip the "request for additional evidence" step completely and already start a deportation (in the case of a H-1B renewal, or even green card process).

RFE is just a generic term for requesting additional evidence in response to an application. The other possible responses are approval, NOID(notice of intent to deny) and outright rejection.