Meta Data Scientist interview questions

I had a phone interview and then a video chat coding challenge. I use CoderPad on my laptop and someone is also video chatting with me and can see what I code. It was using SQL. He first asked me, using a dataset, how I would define an "active user". After I gave my definition, he asked me to create the metric using SQL. Unfortunately for me, I gave a complicated way of defining an active user instead of just saying "someone who clicked 5 times". It's as if they ask you to run a mile, then after the mile, ask you to beat that time by running a second mile. Why not just evaluate the time you run the mile in? It made no sense to me