Need a reality check for frontend assignment expetations

I am a EU-based frontend developer with 7+ YOE. Currently going through interviews for the first time in 3 years. I just finished a technical interview where we discussed a simple TV shows dashboard (

I am a EU-based frontend developer with 7+ YOE. Currently going through interviews for the first time in 3 years. I just finished a technical interview where we discussed a simple TV shows dashboard (think Netflix browse page) I had built for the test assignment. For small assignments like this, I usually do not use state management libraries such as Redux because the projects are typically too small to justify that level of complexity. However, I fully expect a discussion about the trade-offs between different state management approaches. In this case, the interviewers did not start that discussion. Instead, they asked why I did not use Redux, as if it was an obvious choice. When I tried to talk about trade-offs, they redirected the conversation, so we never actually discussed it. The second thing that surprised me was related to accessibility and keyboard navigation (which again, I was fully ready to discuss). The task was to implement horizontally scrollable rows of show genres. During the demo, the first thing they checked was whether it was possible to navigate between the genre rows using the keyboard. My implementation did not support that, but they seemed to fully expect that functionality. I think there is no single obvious way of implementing this: should tab navigate between items or whole categories? Do we want to use keyboard arrows as well? On a real project I would simply raise this question with product or UX. The third point was about data caching. This is another topic I normally expect to discuss rather than fully implement in a small test assignment. The interviewer pointed out that when opening a specific show and then returning to the list, the data was refetched. They immediately asked why I had not cached it, again as if it was expected by default. So now I am wondering: is it specific to this company, or do companies generally expect small assignments to be built as fully production-ready applications now? It definitely did not feel like this was the expectation in my previous 2 rounds (2019 and 2023).