Not had to do this myself, but any time we are hiring someone technical their CV lands on my desk.
Having a portfolio at all puts you in the top 10% of candidates. No, sticking your course assignments on GitHub doesn’t count.
If I’m hiring a full stack dev, I’d probably be more interested in seeing a well-developed “thin slice” through all the layers than lots of features - it’s a portfolio piece, you don’t need to convince me to buy it, just that you might be interesting to talk to.
No matter what you do, I’m probably going to ask you to defend your technology/design/architecture choices, partly to see how you react to criticism, partly to see if you can talk intelligently about things.
Personally I’m a pragmatist, so I’d probably rather see that you’ve gone and found a suitable ORM/front end framework/… and used it sensibly than written everything by hand yourself (a builder who insists on forging their own nails isn’t a very good builder), but be prepared to talk about the tools you’ve used
Not had to do this myself, but any time we are hiring someone technical their CV lands on my desk.