Indeed.

It kinda takes the fun out of programming. Sometimes you just don't bother with error-checking and with making code production-grade, because you just wanted to publish this small thing that other people might find useful. If people find it useful but find bugs, they might as well send pull-requests.

And let's be honest: error checking is important and everything but it's quite a chore.

Often in your toy project it's okay to be optimistic.

And often the purpose for writing a project is to explore a topic, not to release a production grade project.

> Oh, that was a learning project (or prototype code). If I were to write this code again, I would do $X

...where X is something like "use a unique ptr" or "assign ownership of this object to this other object instead".

Literally looking for their wallet under the lamp post because it's easy to pick nits in your homework assignments, but difficult to determine whether you could be a productive team member today under completely different circumstances with complete different incentives and forces on your choices.

They must have no training for their interviewers or maybe a training specifically to make them hostile gatekeepers?

I agree.

The most important phrase here is at the end:

    one candidate just got bumped to the next 
    stage based solely on the fact that in they
    had a “Making awesome pancakes” in the CV, 
    which made me laugh.

And, it's fine.

Junior candidates have to be aware of this and don't get demotivated.