Now, if you're a smaller business, you'll very likely notice these effects and the number of resumes is rather small. But in larger businesses they may get thousands, tens of thousands of resumes, and the vast majority of them are culled by automatic processes and people that have no understanding of the real requirements of these jobs and said 'generic' resume might just allow you to get past said filter better than randomly stating who you are.

Considering many companies are adding AI-proficiency to their hiring metrics, maybe these folks are onto something. It won't be long before AI is doing the resume shuffling and interviewing, so these candidates will be more an more relatable to the interviewer.

> People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist.

Rarely? Almost everyone I know that has art hanging in their homes, that they bought because the liked it, couldn't tell me thing one about the artist behind any of it.

I keep only sending major works I've created or contributed to, to the potential employers I have carefully selected, privately, by law (in my jurisdiction) they are not allowed to publish/use it.

I still contribute to open-source but clearly these references tend to have less and less value for job hunting in my experience, unless you own a very, very popular repo.

My advice is to publish selectively and only where the expected returns beat the downsides. The data this person wants from potential hires are not included in this. I would safely avoid their company if these are the kind of fire hoops he wants me to jump through.

Every day thousands of people visit museums and galleries and peruse thousands of artworks by artists they know little about (even famous artists) and form perfectly valid opinions. Sure, it may help to know about the artist to understand the artwork in greater context, but that is by no means a requirement in order to form an opinion about what you see on the surface.

It's also possible to appreciate and have opinions about ancient art, where we have no idea who the artist is.

Or maybe you know enough people are just generally mean and jerk enough that you don't want to listen to their silly criticism and over-the-topness. And there really isn't any benefit to you for putting it out there.

People are relying on these things because hiring systems are rejecting their applications otherwise.

As for the AI generated portfolios and Git repos... that's not quite the same thing, but even then it's because expectations for employees seem to have become rather ridiculous in recent years. It's apparently not enough that you've got experience working in a field, you're expected to be obsessed with it in your free time too, and document every little thing you ever worked on online for all and sundry to see.