I think attempting to hire people who are passionate is a by-product of an industry where it's been difficult to reliably hire software engineers at the level that the hiring manager's would prefer. There are a lot of problems with the expectations that hiring managers have.

Most hiring managers seem to be looking for candidates that can take a feature, ticket, or idea and just make it happen. Which often requires someone with decently mature experience and a variety of skills. They then use Passion as a strong indicator for this kind of success.

Passion can also be used as an indicator for people who are willing to work more than what they are paid for or a way to ask do you have responsibilities, limitations, disabilities that prevent you from writing code on the weekends and/or evenings?

I think it's safe to say, that if passion is being used as a gating question or primary metric for hiring decisions it's likely that it won't work to meet a company’s hiring needs.

If Passion is used as part of a constellation of data to help inform and build out a broader understanding of a potential candidate, it's likely to have minimal negative consequences and might even be helpful.