While it's nice for someone to have a public portfolio of URLs they've worked on you can't really rely on that so much now. 15 years ago sure, everyone made websites so you just asked to see what site's the candidate had built. Over the past 10 years I've found it increasingly common that developers working with front end tech are building things they can't show off - SaaS, internal apps, etc. That's one of the reasons I like to see a personal site or a side project - often that's the only publicly visible code they have.
Ok sure, if you have nothing to show off and no publicly visible code, then sure a nice site might help. My last two companies I worked at have publicly visible websites that I worked on that I can point to, so I don't see why that would matter in my case.
