I dunno, it doesn't always mean that (though I have encountered this kind of abuse).

Passion for what someone does is awesome, in that they'll actually notice (and speak up) when sh*t is messed up. I love working with people who care about this stuff.

It's entirely orthogonal to whether or not they have side-projects, so I would always try and get signal for this in the interview itself, rather than looking for a GitHub or whatnot (although I almost always look at someone's code when it's on their CV, which isn't all that common in data science).