I completely and totally sympathize with your issues with Leetcode. As someone who never enjoyed competitive programming, I think it is especially frustrating when I realize that it has become the default standard for hiring filters. The way I see it, choosing not to go down that route, seems to at this stage restrict one to very few companies.

In fact, there are way more companies who are finding it easier to set up an automatic hackerrank filter, which invariably involves a competitive programming question.

If you have a PhD, have relevant publications and you can apply for a research role, I suppose you can avoid it, at least at the Big companies.

But for Engineers, IDK, I know folks who are at the Principal/Staff level at G/FB/Amazon and even they have talked about having to undergo at least one Leetcode filter. And to be clear, I am talking about Machine Learning Engineers and not regular Software Engineers.