It sounds like you have the mentality that everybody must be a front end developer. I work in a domain that's very much not front end development, I've partici

It sounds like you have the mentality that everybody must be a front end developer. I work in a domain that's very much not front end development, I've participated in interview rounds for at least 100 different candidates, I don't think I've seen "side projects" ever be a factor in someone getting hired, not even once. The one thing that did put an applicant way ahead of the pack was contributing to open source projects relevant to our domain. It didn't have to be anything super duper impressive, we just liked to see a history of submitting meaningful PRs and getting them through code review.