I feel like this could be companies looking more for a designer role rather than a front end programmer role. They are often mixed because most people don't know what to label developers.

I work for a company now that frequently interviews front end/js devs and frankly if we find ANY github/public code it puts you in the lead above the next guy. What you normally write doesn't matter a whole lot because most concepts transfer to any language.

Most of our applicants give us no previous code they have actually written. I fail to see how it can ever be argued that something < nothing.