There are a couple of things that make this kind of tricky imo, even as someone who generally wants to find passionate people when hiring. Over my career though, these things have led me away from using that as my primary motivator:
The first is that there are just a lot of people out there nowadays who can convincingly talk about programming for an hour and still somehow not be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Frankly, though, this is really rarely obviously self-taught people. It's usually people who have degrees but managed to kind of skirt around doing actual work during their degree, or who have advanced degrees and it's just been too long since they did much practical coding.
At the first job I had where I was involved in hiring we started with a talking interview and then did a small coding test (which was: write a program that outputs some text of a particular format, take as long as you like, come get us when you're done or if you have questions). Eventually, we had to flip the order around because we had so many people come in who seemed really promising and then literally couldn't write a loop in a language they chose.
The second is that just selecting for passion also selects for a bunch of unrelated traits like free time, wealth, etc. There are plenty of really brilliant coders out there for whom it's just a job. As with literally any job. Many of those people don't really have the luxury of having a history that's littered with working on things they were actually excited about.
In the end, the social forces that created bell labs and the general sense that coding is a thing people do because they're passionate about were/are probably temporary, and programming is likely to become more and more "just a job" for most practitioners. And there shouldn't really be anything wrong with that.
All that said, I do think people pass up programmers with potential a lot. Everyone wants someone who can hit the ground running, but in my experience a lot more mileage is gained in the long run by hiring people who grow into their role. I think to really find these people you often have to go deeper than just looking at their passion projects. A good coding session can tell you a lot about how they think and communicate. And that's where you find people with potential to reach beyond their history.