Reflections on my recent job search

TL;DR: Just grind leetcode and keep applying, bro
After several months of a grueling job hunt and several sips of fine whiskey, I have decided to waste your time by jotting down some thoughts on my recent job search. I lost my job late last year/early this year, took some time off, and recently received an offer which was better than my previous job in terms of TC. In no particular order, my thoughts are as follows:
* Recruiting departments are completely fucked right now. I received some recruiter callbacks over 2 months after I applied to positions. Other recruiters were very open about their overload and admitted to declining work from HMs. Sometimes positions are "opened" for procedural purposes even if there is an internal candidate who has all but secured the role. My personal hypothesis is that recruiting was hit hard in layoffs, and they are struggling to keep up now that hiring is picking up.
* There are more candidates than you realize. I've heard multiple EMs saying they'll get hundreds of applicants within 48hrs of a job being posted. If you aren't a referral or match the keyword screen, you're gone. If you aren't perfect on the tech screen, you're gone. Use your network if you have one, or else make sure your resume is flawless.
* It's mostly luck of the draw. If you aren't familiar with the theme of the question, if your interviewer is a misanthrope, if your interviewer only got 3 hrs sleep for god knows what reason, FUCK you. I've drawn some "senior engineers" as interviewers for sys design that didn't know what Kafka was. I've drawn others that refused to allow me to use a core lib to solve a problem. I've drawn others that were very reasonable human beings. There is no rhyme or reason to this madness. It is simply madness. In one of the more memorable interviews, the interviewer didn't even know how to solve the given problem. They tried to help out and ended up making a complete fool of themselves. I would bet that right now, most employed engineers could not pass their own company's interviews. The bar is very high.
* Make sure you are also interviewing them. I spent 30 minutes with an HM that was a former employee at a famously toxic company and spotted more red flags than an expert game of minesweeper. Craft your questions well and you can easily separate the toxic employers from the sane ones. Don't settle for shitty companies even in a down market, if you can help it.
* Don't ignore behaviorals. This should seem obvious, but given how many candidates there are on the market right now, you're out if you can't ace the coding as well as the behavioral interviews. I would strongly recommend writing your STAR stories down and reciting them with some well placed facial expressions in order to curry favor with your interviewer.
This took me way longer to write than originally intended, so I'm signing off. Also the leetcode thing wasn't a joke. The more LC problems you can regurgitate on the spot, the better [possibility of landing a high TC job]. Regurgitation is the hallmark of a strong engineer, which is why they ask LC questions. Godspeed.

EDIT: Some additional details:
- This was in the US
- I was targeting high-paying companies, which means they were generally pretty big (others have pointed out these observations may not apply to smaller companies)
- For the offer I am accepting, the total time from application to offer was ~2.5 months