Nutty questions:

First, most of the questions have hidden goals or obscure and indirect paths to unclear information. The goals and information obtained this way are clearly highly unreliable. To believe that such obscure and indirect searching can yield the desired goals or information needs a questioner who is just delusional.

Second, a lot of the questions have to do with efforts by the candidate to learn things. Okay: Nearly all of us want to learn things to get ahead in our careers and lives. E.g., that's the main reason people expend the time, money, and effort to go to college.

So, there really are some good ways to know, but the interview questions are really poor ways. In my experience, here is some GOOD evidence:

(1) Learning. In my career, I was doing applied math and computing for US national security. So, when I encountered what seemed to be important topics, I got relevant books and papers and learned. (A) I accumulated a professional library that filled three bookcases, each 1' deep, 3' wide, and 6' high on math and computing. (B) From this library, I studied carefully in whole or major parts of dozens of the books and had the rest available for more. (C) I set aside my career and went for a focused Ph.D. and got it. Point: I was trying REALLY hard to learn; indeed, I went for one of the best paths, a focused Ph.D. The interview questions never mentioned any such effort, and what the questions did mention were far inferior to a Ph.D. Bummer.

(2) Initiative. (A) From what I had done before entering the Ph.D. program, I had already picked my dissertation research problem and made good progress on it. For the five Ph.D. qualifying exams, I did the best in the class on four of them and for three of them just used what I had already taught myself before entering the Ph.D. program. I did the rest of my research for my Ph.D. independently in my first summer. I did the final software development, writing, and typing independent of any advisors. That was a LOT of "initiative". I did give a seminar on my work, and some other students then did related Ph.D. dissertations. So, the results of my "initiative" were seen as high quality stuff. (B) At one point, I saw a problem, got a course to address the problem, not necessarily solve it, but in two weeks found a solid solution with a nice, new theorem. The work was publishable, and later I did publish it in the respected journal JOTA. So, that was some nice "initiative" with results that were fast and good. (C) Before my Ph.D. I was in a software house bidding on a development project for the Navy. At one point, some of the material from the Navy didn't make sense. In five days, independently I educated myself on power spectral estimation (mostly from Blackman and Tukey), wrote and ran illustrative software, and on the last evening called in the relevant Navy engineer, gave him a fast tutorial on the power spectral estimation he wanted, and showed him the illustrative software I'd written and the results showing how with more data the estimates converged to the right answer. As a result our software house got "sole source" on the development contract. That was fast, successful "initiative". I've got a long list of such.

Bottom line it: In a job, from an employee, people HATE such initiative.
Similarly for learning, knowing, and applying stuff.

Such learning and initiative are for self-funded, sole-solo founder CEOs. By the way, VCs totally ignore any such learning or initiative.