Even developers don't need github profiles. It's pretty weird to see this re-iterated so often, 100's of thousands of developers the world over don't have github profiles and they're doing just fine.
Yea, this madness about github profiles must stop. I cringe every time I see someone here pimping some github "projects" they whip up in minutes which obviously they have no passion in.
Why do you cringe when someone shares a useful project with the developer community? Are you cringing at submissions on /new?
Although it is pretty cool to go into an interview and find out their engineering team actively uses one of your open source projects. You can't really get that any other way.
If it was a requirement, there'd be a lot of very empty profiles. I've only seen a couple of instances[0] where open source and design have come together to make a product with lasting visual impact. It's certainly uncommon.