I think side projects can be valuable when you want to demonstrate competence at something, and you don't otherwise have experience to draw on. If you're a barista who's learning to code in their spare time, or you want to understand a hot new technology, sure. Otherwise, I'd rather ask you about your actual work.
Mine hasn’t been that way, but in my experience those publicly visible artifacts tend to be high noise signals anyway.
Over time I’ve generally converged on a few criteria for the resume stage: (1) does this person have a minimally credible claim of being able to deliver projects at the level of the position? (2) if the job requires background knowledge, do they have a relevant background?
If they have a public Github profile, I might go look at some PR’s created by them to confirm that they’re generally respectful to others and that their actual code looks not-insane.
Once you actually watch them work and talk to them, you will get a better sense for them as a candidate, but CVs really don’t tell you much, so it’s best not to pretend that they do.
Not every act of noticing must be noticed by general public, if that makes sense.
You might be doing a good job and get promoted and be part of 99.9% of population who will never make headlines.
I have interviewed hundreds of candidates, not just red their CVs (typically around 1 candidate a week for the past 15 years, currently 3 candidates a week on average).
What I have learned is to be very cautious when looking through CVs lest you select for candidates who can make good looking CVs.
I have met many nice and competent people who don't write blog post and who can't make nice CV. They don't make projects for show because they have enough work at... work and they don't do ten other projects because they want to focus where it really matters for them. They might have other non-technical hobbies like riding a bike or picking up girls at the bar. They may not feel the need to impose their interests and thoughts on everybody else or they might think their thoughts and experiences are not at all valuable to general public.
A person who writes blog posts, for-show github repos, who creates public image, is just one of many types of developers. If you select for this you are missing out on many excellent people.