Interviewee: Check me out! I wrote a NES emulator that is cycle accurate and supports a game with a specialized chip that I reverse engineered that no other emulator supported.
There’s a large spectrum of quality of public content out there. You could say the same thing about any resume.
But that's a counterexample to the OP's thesis that "it doesn't take much". An "NES emulator that is cycle accurate and supports a game with a specialized chip that I reverse engineered that no other emulator supported" is a MASSIVE undertaking that would take a huge amount of time and effort. I would certainly give a candidate like that a second look - if NES emulators were remotely related to the kind of skills I was looking for.
You're presupposing that the hiring manager would be able to tell what skills are involved in making an NES emulator, or even what skills they are looking for.
I think you're taking the post's 'it doesn't take much' too literally, and the 'I have 239 twitter followers / wrote an emoji generator' reads like a straw man argument. Of course that wouldn't be impressive. The article mentions putting screenshots into a README on a project, but doesn't mention what the project would be... clearly if you're being judged from public information, the less impressive it is the less impressive you'll sound.
Interviewer: Cool. Can you setup mysql replication? What does a read replica mean?
Interviewee: Neat! Check out my github on a emoji generator!
Interviewer: ....
Interviewer: [proceeds to slack least favorite teammate to follow up interview]