I'm not affiliated with Gitlab in any way, so I wouldn't know, but I'd speculate that the point of these questions is not to see if a candidate knows what MVC is or how a request is made, but to see if they can explain these things in writing.
It may seem like a pointless skill but, at least in my experience, fully remote companies have to rely on it for a lot of things. I've met a lot of people who were great at what they did, but couldn't write an useful email. That's less of a big deal when you can communicate in person and smooth things over via blackboard diagrams and back-and-forth questions. But when you're an ocean apart and have only four hours of overlapping hours that's a lot harder.
FWIW, I used to be involved in hiring for remote positions at a former workplace, and we had one of these, precisely in order to see if our candidate could write an email or a wiki page explaining something. The only thing we did differently was that we used this at a slightly later step and tailored the questions to each candidate's experience, so as to avoid canned responses (not that it's hard for a good eye that has access to an Internet-connected machine to spot those).
It may seem like a pointless skill but, at least in my experience, fully remote companies have to rely on it for a lot of things. I've met a lot of people who were great at what they did, but couldn't write an useful email. That's less of a big deal when you can communicate in person and smooth things over via blackboard diagrams and back-and-forth questions. But when you're an ocean apart and have only four hours of overlapping hours that's a lot harder.
FWIW, I used to be involved in hiring for remote positions at a former workplace, and we had one of these, precisely in order to see if our candidate could write an email or a wiki page explaining something. The only thing we did differently was that we used this at a slightly later step and tailored the questions to each candidate's experience, so as to avoid canned responses (not that it's hard for a good eye that has access to an Internet-connected machine to spot those).