Funny hiring email I got from ReMatter

This company posts their job listings on HN, and I applied a while back. I got this email today:

Last December, you applied to a Software Engineering role here at ReMatter. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to interview as many people as we would have liked to for this role. So, we'd like to open up our process more broadly and make our interview funnel available to more folks. I'm attaching a pdf of our challenge here. If you'd like to give it a go, try to complete it in the next two weeks. It's a fairly significant challenge, but it closely mirrors our day-to-day work and successful completion of the challenge carries significant weight in our interview consideration. If you're no longer interested or have accepted another position in the meantime, sorry to bug you! I apologize that we couldn't get back to you sooner. Best wishes in your new role! Otherwise, let me know if you have any questions about the challenge.

The attached challenge is to OCR a driver's license in a web app.

Offering a bit of free insight for them and others looking for candidates. I was going to send this back as an email, but I figured it might be of interest to others:

- You've emailed the candidate two months after their application to ask them to do a code challenge that by your admission is a sizable burden for a working professional.

- You've not-very-subtly implied that the candidate was not your first choice, as if you're throwing them a bone.

- In the pdf it states you want the user to host it somewhere, which gives me a hunch that whoever does the first review on this can't be expected to build the app.

- In the PDF you bolded and italicized that you want a private github repo. Why?

- When you mention that it's a smaller version of a feature you "recently built", that implies to me you're still in an early enough state that a competent code challenge could influence your actual implementation, making a candidate's submission free work for you.

At a high level, you've asked a candidate to invest an annoying amount of time to give you some work from which you might even be able to take real inspiration (or even worse, copy), having put in zero effort on your end, and offered no compensation for their effort.

I am sure your approach comes from confidence in your firm's appeal to candidates, but I find the message itself a very negative signal. Most experienced folks will turn this down, so I guess it lines up with your implication that you're reducing standards (or can't figure out how to choose candidates, or how to interview them? I can't tell, it just smells bad.)