Caraway interview questions

Several 1:1 meetings, never met the actual manager. In all my past interviews, the manager was either the first or second person I met. Why is this manager so elusive? In past interviews, I always had to prepare a portfolio presentation to share process about my past experiences and projects. No one at Caraway was interested in this (I confirmed with the recruiter) and so I never had an opportunity to share knowledge that is just as important, if not more, than the small sample of my work that they saw online. "Hiring an agency is too expensive" and so they were looking to create an internal visualization pipeline. This role would require me to establish new internal creative workflows and processes within the company, and eventually I would lead a future team of overseas designers (to enable Caraway to have tighter turnaround deadlines). Surprisingly, I wasn't asked questions that would help them understand my level of expertise that goes beyond "can you make renders like this?" There is a 7-day unpaid test project they say everyone in the company is required to do, but I know for a fact that this is untrue and had this confirmed by one of the interviewers who didn't have to do this. Test projects for this role should also be extremely simple to come up with, but for some reason they were overthinking this and saying in most meetings "we are still trying to figure out this project" ?? How much are they trying to extract from the candidate? The FAANG company that I worked at previously didn't require me to do a test project. Everyone was kind, and I got lots of great signals during my meetings. Unfortunately, Caraway completely ghosted me and didn't have the decency to tell me that I'm no longer a candidate. I would have been open to the test project, but after seeing several reviews on Glassdoor about poor communication and difficult interviewing practices, it seems highly possible that they would ghost me or give me minimal feedback after completing unpaid work for them.