[mountainriver]

> You're excluding a slew of people who either don't have the time or inclination to start and possibly maintain an open source project.

And leetcode isn't excluding a bunch of people who don't have time or inclination to memorize puzzles?

> They'd also need to pick an appropriate project that demonstrated the technical depth and scope an interviewer would be interested in.

Then build useful things, this is how the world actually works

> You're also hoping the interviewer will do an appropriate deep dive into the code base to understand it and judge it correctly

Thats always the case with every interview style

> Finally, you can't be sure the person actually wrote the code

You should be able to tell this easily by talking to them about it. If you're at all unsure, dig deeper on why they did things, someone who didn't write it wouldn't be able to answer hard questions.