It's funny you put it this way. I actually did a couple of hard level Leetcode problems and I thought they would help me immensely in my day to day life in addition to helping me get better at interviews.

No such avail. In fact, unless these algorithms and problem solving methodologies are baked into your memory there's no way you are white boarding a Leetcode hard level problem in an interview.

What I was impressed at an Uber interview was their system design interview process - which basically boiled down to 'how do I abstract retrying a 429 - rate limit exceeded.

What I take is that - the interviewer is expecting a very specific solution even in an open ended system design question. It's like throwing a needle in a haystack at you and expect you to get to the needle in like an hour :).