Interview Experience: Big teams look for potential, smaller teams look for how fast you can instantly come add value

My interview experience has been a massively varied at this point, but what I've noticed is the massive difference between big companies like FAANG and smaller orgs like DS in banking or random small companies

At FAANG it's kind of like an IQ + knowledge test (what google calls Role related knowledge) and smaller companies do assessments for very specific types of modeling or use cases, like build a model being evaluated on a certain metric.

So at FAANG I was asked questions like "why is the formula for s.d. different for pop. vs sample', or 'what happens to the bias/variance in x,y,z situation' mean while at companies that are smaller and pay less they sent me a random 30-60 minute assessment and asked me to directly clean data and code up a model with sklearn/pandas.

Is this what everyone else has experienced? It does seem like at smaller or traditional companies test if you will be a good code monkey while others look for actual understanding.