I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks.

Recruiter was helpful in describing the entire interview process and helped me understand what to expect. There were to be two technical rounds and then a final technical round. I did not make it past the first technical round. It is not clear why I was passed over as no feedback was provided, but I thought the questions asked were fair enough and did not include any gotchas.

Talk through refs in React and why they should be avoided. What are your thoughts on why React doesn't provide a direct API for manipulating DOM and listening to DOM events and instead you must rely on using refs?

Mock code review of a simple utility function: const isNotNil = (v) => !!v;