I don't code much outside of work. I have hobby projects from 10+ years ago, but they're not much more than landing pages copied from templates and wordpress installs. I mostly work in backend/data/platform engineering professionally.

If I were asked to make a small project over a weekend, I'd be likely to decline rather than doing a more standard interview, or I'd use AI to do it in a reasonable timeframe (which seems to defeat the purpose as it relates to this discussion)

This points to another issue - when I do code outside of work, it's often specifically to try out things I don't do at work. After a day of doing backend work, I'll maybe put together a basic web UI for something. That code is likely awful because I just need it to be functional more than good, and also probably not related to the work I'd be hired to do.

My most recent real "side projects" are a terrible OSS monte carlo simulator tool that I contributed to, but cannot explain most of the code for, and a half-working React application that has performance issues I never fixed. Both are years old at this point. I'm not sure what an interviewer would gain from those.