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Many of the best programmers I've ever worked with have absolutely no code on GitHub. Why is that? It's because they're using their talents and abilities in industry, solving real problems, in positions where they're obligated to not share the code they've produced.

I'd hire those people any day over somebody with numerous GitHub repos filled with quasi-maintained JavaScript libraries or numerous forks of code they didn't write.

No, Github work demonstrates what work you have done on projects that happen to live on Github. Saying that that is "who you actually are" shows a rather narrow idea of what "being" means.

There are other things than code to define who you are; and even if you're only look for code, that code need not live on Github.

If I give prospective employers my github handle they'll think I'm inactive in open source. If I point them to my webpage they can see the links to all the non-github hosted open source I do (Launchpad, self-hosted, etc).