I think this is forcing me to choose between two evils - do I want to look like I can only write half baked weekend projects, or do I want to look like I don’t write any code in my free time at all?

Fair point, for me its the latter. I cant put on my CV brief descriptions of side projects I'm working on, during an interview I can give more details on those, etc... Still not ideal because they'd probably want to see the code, but its the lesser of two evils for me