I bombed 3 coding tests in a row: am I really the only one who finds this hard?

True, I've had my mental wrecked by time limit exceeded more than once or twice lol

If you fail three times in a row, there’s some luck involved, not just skill. I passed on my sixth attempt, but until then almost every one was a time limit exceeded. A lot of TLEs are actually caused by algorithm choice, so after you solve a problem, just writing down “why isn’t this approach the official solution?” separately makes a huge difference next time. And if you didn’t understand the problem, just getting into the habit of reading the statement slowly twice will fix it most of the time. For problems you couldn’t even touch, read the editorial and solve just 3 problems of a similar type. Rather than starting over from scratch, it’s much faster to drill only the types you got wrong.