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Is it too much to ask that they actually look at the content of the pull requests?

All they have to do is ask them in the phone screen "So what did you contribute to Swift?"

"I analysed the swift codebase for character sequence problems and actively contributed in reducing these. My contributions were responsible for eliminating hundreds of possible issue reports to the project."

How is that a problem? If you really want to know the details, they are a single git query away.

My suspicion is that someone who's smart, engaged and motivated enough to have figured out a way to be able to say they're a Swift contributor by fixing typos is probably in the top 10% of candidates anyway.

One solution would be to implement upvotes/downvotes on github pull requests.

good point , but it applied to every open source project too

A contribution for a typo is also a serious contribution