Continental Accessory Graphic Artist/Designer interview questions

Had a zoom interview with 2 managers. And despite my extensive experience, they still deemed it necessary to do a "design test". On the positive side, they payed me for my time doing this. The company sends me some samples to work from, and a day later I hand in my design sample and waited to hear back. When I didn't hear back and emailed in, they proceeded to ask me to do ANOTHER sample. What proceeded to follow was me going back and forth with the manager for days, who kept promising to send me samples for me to work from, but they kept "forgetting" to send them and failing to follow up. It was only when I asked to come personally to their HQ to pick up the samples, they emailed the next day that they offered the position to a different candidate and they accepted. When I asked for feedback, they said that the candidate already had a background in their preferred industry...something that wasn't made inherently clear in their original job posting in which that was what they were looking for. They were purposely stringing me along as a backup plan.