As the People before me already mentioned, there are several ways to solve those tasks. I think, the first best version that works is absolutely fine in an interview.

However, once you are hired and familiar with SQL you can concentrate on optimizing your queries – which you should do when working with big data, b/c cloud services oftentimes bill every second of your query. So slow queries tend to become literally costly.

And I absolutely disagree with the opinion that SQL is boring. I really like that complex transformation problems that can be solved with it (especially in combination with dbt). Or for data cleaning, data munging, data transforming – you name it.