But I don't have time. Isn't NeetCode the fast path?

It was the fast path once, and it stopped being true. Doing the minimum to pass feels fast because it gets you through a single interview, but the cost shows up later, since you pass, you forget, and the next time you job hop or get laid off you start again from zero and prep the entire thing over from scratch. People who actually understand the concepts never have to do that, and I never do, because the ideas are intuitive to me now and every future loop rests almost entirely on work I already did once.

There is exactly one real exception. If your interview is two weeks out and you are underprepared, then yes, cram, because pattern drilling is a perfectly good way to brush up fast when the clock is genuinely that short. But if you are a student, or even a junior dev with some runway, there is no reason to spend your energy hunting for tricks to do as little DSA as humanly possible, since you have the time to build the thing that compounds and you should just build it.

It is also not wasted effort outside of interviews, which people tend to forget. DSA wires your brain to break a problem down, reason about tradeoffs, and debug faster, and all of that carries straight into real engineering, because it is a stripped-down version of the same skill rather than a separate one, so do not cope and call it useless. And here is the uncomfortable part: getting better at DSA is about as easy as self-improvement ever gets, since the material is standard and the feedback is instant, so if you cannot figure out how to improve at something this legible, then improving at real engineering, where the feedback is slow and the problems are ambiguous, is going to be much harder. People love to point out that Linus Torvalds does not grind LeetCode, and sure, he would also be terrifying at it if he ever bothered, and the same is true of George Hotz, but the mistake is reading that backwards. You are not operating at their level of engineering, so being bad at LeetCode does not secretly mean you are cracked at the real thing, and you do not get to borrow their exemption.