AFAICT no one actually believes this. There are plenty of places where building something important will get you in the door for an interview. There don't appear to be any employers that would be satisfied by track record without whiteboard performance.
I think that is correct, that most employers today insist on the monkey show interview process. I meant it more as countering what OP said about feeling like garbage. Being a great engineer in fact (building reliable and durable systems) is at best correlated and at worst completely orthogonal to what is measured in interviews today.
