I wish companies cared about side-projects as qualifications for hiring. I send full projects and they never seem to peer into them when I query. I want them to

I wish companies cared about side-projects as qualifications for hiring. I send full projects and they never seem to peer into them when I query. I want them to look so we can have a discussion around them. In the last 10 years I've built 40 web-apps and that doesn't include ~20 codebases of my own I don't understand how you can be a programmer without having side-projects or at least contributions in open-source. I end up contributing open source or creating my own libraries via work, so I'd still have things to show outside the scope of standard hours. I can get not wanting to do CS algorithm puzzles in interviews since thats a specialized discipline rarely applicable to web-app development but this I can't get behind.