Just being honest here, but both of your posts come off, to me, much more as you rationalizing a belief about what is true based on what you want to be true, and trying to "convince" us that most of this thing that "we" possibly value isn't all that valuable. Minimizing people's work on github as just some trivial side project, that should be ignored, because you don't want to do it, just isn't a reflection of the reality the situation. I freely admit this might be offbase, but it would appear you are arguing against -really- sound advice simply because you don't want the reality that that advice implies we live in. Except we do.

The underlying issue is that from a hiring perspective, all other things being equal, a candidate that can provably show things is ahead of the guy who simple says he can. Even if "we" all sit around and minimize that as some trivial nonsense that anyone could do and that it proves, at best, they can form "syntactically correct code", the fundamentals of the situation haven't changed. Showing is better than saying. It always will be.

There is an undercurrent of a strawman, as well, in this conversation. I don't think anyone out there is taking actual trivial github stuff and basing hiring decisions on it. But I wouldn't be surprised if some superficial github stuff haven't gotten people past a resume screen that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten past.