I've seen more and more of that behavior where people will just dump someone else's code into a GitHub repo and call it a day, assuming it'll look great when someone reviews that. I instead normally look at the commits and it's pretty obvious when something was not actually made by them, or what little changes they did to someone else's code. Even easier if you look for little snippets of the code and find it replicated somewhere else; a good indication it's just some online tutorial's code.

To me, the best repo reviews I've done is when I see something that is real: many granular commits, some refactoring, some documentation (even if just a real README), etc.

I love the concept of online education, but I think modern online programming courses are just perpetuating this idea that programming is a skill you can master in a couple of weeks and then you're done. You get people following along a path with lots of hand-holding, and ending up with the same end product and no understanding of any of it.

I almost yearn for the days where programming was so impenetrable you needed to have a real calling for it. You were guaranteed to get people that were in it for the love of what they could do, not because they heard in some podcast that it's the new thing and decided to pay for an online course with the promises of making $150k/y.