Yes but many employers want to look at how many stars and forks your repo got on github. It's a nice metric to filter repos from candidates, it is not enough for sure but usually repos with tons of stars are considered a good signal and it allows employers to save time before they start looking at your code. Bitbucket doesn't have enough users to offer these kinds of interesting metrics unfortunately.
Wow, I've never seen that. I mean, people often like to see some kind of evidence of something you've worked on, and looking at someone's Github profile is an easy way to do that. But I've never heard of stars and forks being used as a crude filtering mechanism.
There are so many factors that go into whether or not a repo becomes popular, which aren't necessarily related to anything that reflects on the creator's merits as an engineering hire. I think you'd skew your candidate pool in a weird way if you leaned on these metrics too heavily. Honestly, I'd be curious to hear more about how it's used in hiring.
I'm not sure about your sampling of "many". I can count the number of interviews where my code was actually looked at on one hand; no doubt this is different for unicorn-type companies.
At any rate, enter the law of triviality. Making something simple that lots of people will understand is more likely to lead to more stars than something brilliant but complex, yet more indicative of development skill. This selects for gaming of the system and/or salesmanship; no doubt said employers will screech about a lack of "qualified" candidates before long.
