Why do companies have a competitive coding round when at the end, they want the person to develop things. I know most of them want software engineers instead of developers but the persons developement skills also matters and at the end when the person does not have any developement skills, how is he gonna help.

In one of the program ran by one of the biggest MNC of the World, I was selected from a hackathon and there are some peoples who are selected by a competitive coding round. Now, we are given an assignment in which we have to make a tic-tac-toe game which is AI driven. During one of the meetings with other group members and mentor, many of the persons who got entries by competative programing round does not know any bit of HTML. Out of the 5 weeks of program, they have spent more than 4 weeks in just learning basic HTML, CSS and still they are learning. I don't know even they can complete the program in given timeline or not but this has been a major flaw in recruiting process which I thought is now good.