.split return strings and that coerces them into numbers.

Granted, that's a weird way to do it, but it's not pointless. At all. If you try to remove that part, it wouldn't work.

This solution is bad. It is not about complexity, it is about memory usage. There is O(n) additional memory.

Your solution loops through twice as well... What's the point of nitpicking time complexity when you are doing the same thing? Your else also doesn't need to find anything. You already have it in evenValues[0]. Even with that optimization, your worst case is still n^3 for an array length of 3 and n^2 for other cases.

At least come up with a performant solution without unnecessary things before complaining that other people's solutions are "unnecessary and not performant".