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If I took this as a "Question to prepare yourself for an interview" and not a "Question you might be asked during an interview" I think it's great.

As prep it's a concise problem you can do on your own time to get your brain working over basic things that you may not have been thinking about lately.

As a question to actually give someone (or receive) during an interview? Seems way to long.

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I work with someone whose go-to question is the 8 Queens problem. I think it's an interesting exercise, but like you said it's quite long - can easily consume most of the interview. It's also very poorly aligned with the kind of work we do and code we write (for example, I can't think of a single place in our code using recursion) and so I'm not a fan of it as part of an interview.

Edit: typo

So, how do the candidates that pass this colleague's interview do in the actual job?

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