Your first paragraph is spot on. When we hire developers, we always like to see two things: their portfolio and their GitHub.
A lot of developers that I interviewed didn't have any activity on their GitHub. So the first thing I'd look for is simply whether they have a profile and if they are active. In terms of projects, if they are junior devs, I don't even care that much about the type of project that they've completed. Any project that shows a passion for programming will do. Dumebi Okolo