Your anecdote reminds me of the time a company I was interviewing at flew me half way across the country for their "onsite interview", and 75% of the sessions were me, seating in one of their offices, zooming/skyping with the interviewer.
One company did that to me twice, the whole while telling me that they never allow remote work and I had to relocate to Mountain View, especially despite neither team I was interviewing with was based in Mountain View.
The team I had the most face-to-face interaction with was because I managed to talk the recruiter into to allowing me to interview in the SF office, where some of the team actually worked, despite continuing to insist I'd have to move to Mountain View if I got the job, that "no one" works in the SF office (despite the closest thing to a majority of the team I interviewed with did), and that remote work was also not an option. That trip the worst interview I had in the day was remotely with someone with "regularly works from home" seniority despite "it's not generally allowed". So much about that interview I suffocated in dumb mistakes because I was angry about a lot of details about that interaction given conversations I had had with the recruiters immediately before and after.
The second time the team was mostly based on the East Coast (closer to my home than Mountain View, lol), the recruiter insisted I had to interview in Mountain View, and the only person I interacted face to face with that entire cycle was a different recruiter (terrible flights and bad traffic included).
I had a very hard time not feeling very personally insulted at how much they wasted my time with remote interviews I could have done from home without needing to fly most of the way across the country, continuing to insist that remote work wasn't possible for the positions I was interviewing when very clearly remote work was already the default if they expected people to be in Mountain View working for teams in other cities. It was not a great way to sell Mountain View to me as an option, and I was already quite clear with them that Mountain View wasn't a city I find interesting to live in, if I could avoid it. (Not that I could probably afford SF or even East Bay, but very specifically if I want to live in the Exurbs of an American city, I don't have to leave home to find equally carbon copied wastelands of strip malls, parking lots, and bad traffic just like Mountain View.)
Well yes, my experiences with Mountain View are dominated by these sorts of interview trips trying to "sell" over-sprawled corporate campuses to me for possible relocations. It's not exactly a tourist destination in any other trip I might take to the Bay Area. These companies clearly aren't doing a good job in selling it to me or why I would want to live/commute there.
(I can directly contrast that in my own experiences with an interview in Huntsville, Alabama that gave me a much greater appreciation for the Huntsville area's beauty far beyond "it's where we went to for expensive space museum field trips in school". It did help a lot with my interest in that position, though that wasn't a position that happened for other reasons.)
Tech companies are so focused on making their interview cycles all day gauntlets and grueling/wearying tests/challenges that so many of them forget that they are also in the process of trying to sell the interviewee on their company, their lifestyle, their neighborhood. If you are asking me to potentially relocate, then of course I'm going to be paying attention to every part of how you sell your quality of life and its surroundings. (Especially, if I tell you I'm willing to relocate, but would prefer remote work and would need to be sold on the relocation. I've asked employers to try to sell Mountain View to me and so far most have failed at making it seem like a place I would like to live. That's a lot on them.)
