The non-technical recruiter needs these trivia questions because they need questions with single answers that allows them to separate people with no technical knowledge and people with technical knowledge. The easy way to get past this barrier is to get a referral, then you start at the technical interview.
When I was at Google, I worked in a tiny office, and I was friends with the recruiter who worked that office. A couple of times she asked me to vet the answers to the non-technical questions, because if the candidate went off-script in any way, she simply couldn't tell if it's a wrong answer or a more in-depth answer than the script anticipated. This wasn't part of my job, and if our office wasn't so tiny we wouldn't have had any contact, and she wouldn't have had any engineers to ask.
When I was at Google, I worked in a tiny office, and I was friends with the recruiter who worked that office. A couple of times she asked me to vet the answers to the non-technical questions, because if the candidate went off-script in any way, she simply couldn't tell if it's a wrong answer or a more in-depth answer than the script anticipated. This wasn't part of my job, and if our office wasn't so tiny we wouldn't have had any contact, and she wouldn't have had any engineers to ask.