Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance. Hiring manager, especially if on the tech side and not the HR/business side, probably was trained on CA law requirements in a one day class, but perhaps they forgot, or missed the training, or didn't really think it was important. Don't invent a conspiracy where there probably isn't one.
Also, FWIW, we never used requested salary range for ranking candidates, deciding whether to interview, difficulty of interview questions, or anything like that. We usually needed a person who could roughly do X. We reviewed resumes, did a phone screen, invited a handful of candidates for onsite interviews, filtered out candidates who couldn't do X, then ranked the remaining candidates as to how well we thought they could do X. We'd then take the top candidate and go further with them. It was at this point that we asked them desired salary range so we could see if we could even negotiate something reasonable for both parties. If they declined (which was uncommon and usually only because we were too slow and they found another better offer somewhere else), then we'd repeat this latter part with the second candidate on the list.
That's basically how we did it at two Fortune 500 tech companies over my 16 years there for engineering and management jobs ranging from new college hire to second level managers of 50 people and salaries ranging from $50K to $200K. Again, though, my experience ended in about 2016, so things may have changed since then.