> Now every candidate starts hacking their github full of all kinds of code, or even paying people to, or copying work to create a perfectly manicured "facebooked" version of what their work looks like (probably with fake timestamps too).

I'm of the opinion that going over someone's GitHub code (asking about design decisions, language alternatives, testing, algorithm choices) during an interview is probably orders of magnitutde more valuable than having them implement a linked list. But to each their own.