On top of this, the criticism regarding how the author is self-unaware (I don't entirely disagree) seems especially misguided because often how self-unaware people become self-aware is through constructive feedback. With that in mind, since the author seems to be here, the one piece of feedback I have is that:
"I sent over some different code, it was a 5 line code change that halved the average response time of an API."
I don't know if the author was at this point interested in the job or not (if this was a joke, please disregard) but some clever 5-liner is extremely unlikely to impress anyone looking for a senior engineer and is impossible to evaluate in isolation. Also most of the work involved in "halving the response time" - again, assuming a reasonably complex system - is identifying where the bottleneck is, not writing the simple fix to address the issue that was discovered. You're expected to write substantially more code than that even in a 30-minute technical screen. When people are looking for code samples (again for a senior engineer), they are looking to see the ability to design and organize larger chunks of a system, make trade-offs between different architectures and ability maintain good code hygiene over a larger sample and so on - providing a 5-liner raises more questions than it answers.