[chrisnight]

To clarify, the reason I say that the projects led me to offers was only because they helped lead to the process being started (I.e. led to a first interview). Indeed, other skills are necessary to close the deal.

The way I see the current market, the hard part isn’t the interview-to-offer ratio, it’s the application-to-interview ratio. Grinding leetcode and improving your skills unfortunately doesn’t help you with that. Having a good resume helps (or having good networking).

Referencing back then to what I said originally, everyone has a degree, no one has work experience. Given this, having a cool project is one of the ways to specifically increase this application-to-interview ratio.

However, given this analysis, putting more effort into networking could yield similar results, so this suggests the original point possibly has some truth.