Lemon.io Senior Frontend Developer interview questions

I applied to them through their platform. I filled out my profile, and afterward, they contacted me to schedule a 60-minute interview. The discussion mostly focused on my professional background, my skills, and the Lemon company model. At one point, the interviewer even showed me a specific project where she said I could be a good fit. Then, at the end, came a 7-question test... and that’s where things started to get "interesting." The next day, Lemon (the same interviewer) contacted me via email. She said the client had implemented a developer freeze in the meantime, so they couldn’t hire me for that particular project. "Okay," I said to myself... but then the email continued: based on their internal standards, they also can’t—and don’t want to—hire me at all. That part honestly raised some eyebrows on my side. I mean, their company model is supposed to be: we have a selection-filtering interview process, developers get selected into our pool, and then clients can choose from that pool. So how is it possible that a project-specific hiring freeze was the main reason the selection process was stopped for me—and only afterward did they mention I don't fit into their developer pool? Does this mean that if clients urgently want to hire developers and the company finds someone available on the market, they just skip or loosen their own selection criteria to land that person on the project? Or did the interviewer simply lie in her response email? Because logically, the first step should always be passing their standard selection process—regardless of any specific project. So why was this particular project even mentioned as the reason for not continuing the process? It feels weird—and honestly, I think this is the kind of behavior that should be a red flag for their potential or future clients. From my experience, it seems like the company doesn’t fully follow its own standards, and this "slip" kind of revealed one of their dirty little tricks.