Can confirm. I interview candidates on a regular basis. Company policy that we never invest time in checking a candidate's GitHub. But I do anyway.
Because of the startling amount of people unable to explain the code in their repositories, I've found code quality / problem complexity / stack similarity alone to be a worthless metric. On the other hand, I've found it to be invaluable to get candidates to explain their code and why they made the decision that they did. It's exactly how a practice assignment works, except candidates are much more passionate about the choices and have invested more time in the project overall.
Because of the startling amount of people unable to explain the code in their repositories, I've found code quality / problem complexity / stack similarity alone to be a worthless metric. On the other hand, I've found it to be invaluable to get candidates to explain their code and why they made the decision that they did. It's exactly how a practice assignment works, except candidates are much more passionate about the choices and have invested more time in the project overall.