I agree - it's like a fun code-golf challenge in that you end up with awful, write-only code but you may well end up with a deeper understanding after solving it. It's for circumstances almost opposite to an interview.
The proposed solutions don't even work - for example the tan is only meant to display once per letter.
The actual question does at least ask when it's JS suitable and when isn't it - for example it's irritating to have to wait for a page to init just to be able to access a drop-down menu (hint: use active in CSS instead of a JS toggle).