People only care what you can immediately do for them and if its not 1-to-1 with what they want they don't care.
Its sad but its true.
They said it was immediately obvious I knew what I was doing. Nice to have that edge over people who have nothing to show.
I won't personally judge harshly if it's not prominently displayed on linkedin, or easily searchable. But we've had several candidates that had links to their personal website on linkedin, or even in their resume, and they were ATROCIOUS. I just find it crazy that someone would advertise a personal website that was poorly written. If it's a personal project you don't work on much, then don't show it off on your professional resume.
But I agree with your initial point, we never really used portfolio sites to determine if they were worth hiring.
For reference, my website is here: https://www.alexpetralia.com. I printed out the first page, then could talk about each project quite tangibly with the print-out in hand.
You still need a portfolio, you just also have to SHOW it. It is your job as an applicant, not theirs to research every candidate that comes by.
I do have a somewhat unrelated comment, though. Looking through some of the examples, I have found an analysis of charity „effectiveness“ where effectiveness is defined very simplistically as the amount of money directed to the cause. I just want to highlight that this kind of measure does not tell you much about the real life effectiveness of charities in terms of how much GOOD they actually do because the effectiveness of causes/interventions themselves vary wildly per charity. For example, there is an organization called playpumps international which has likely worsened the life of villagers where they sponsored complicated water pumps that required kids to play on them to produce water compared to simple water pumps that looked less fun but could be used without this effort. Compare this to the Against Malaria Foundation which has consistently shown to be able to save lifes by costeffectively distributing treated bed nets in rural areas of Africa.
For donation recommendations have a look at www.givewell.org or for more general information about the topic, check out www.effectivealtruism.com
If you are totally awesome you could also consider to update your project with references to these websites and if you should use this project in a future pitch shine with great evidence and expertise on the topic ;)