Also a hiring manager. I always do. For me a good personal site is a huge step towards a phone interview. I look for things people do not because anyone told them to do (college projects, internships, work), but because they were excited about it. That initiative and excitement is what will set you apart from the other 100 resumes that look exactly like yours.
At least pre AI it was easy to identify if a blog was done due to interest or for self advertisment.
I haven't been recruiting recently but goes it's even simpler to identify blogs full of loveless AI slop and people who care about a topic. (Even if they use AI for language assistance etc)
Topics, which details being presented, frequency, ...
Just look how it goes with GitHub everyone has some BS repos and then also they spam projects to get contributions for CVs.
Hacktober was the worst but I think it went away because of BS spam contributions.
CVE and in general security issues reporting has this issue nowadays where everyone wants to get CVE on their name to have it for CV. It is worst stuff ever.
I hope you can "infect" others with this kind of view, so that more people adopt it.
My CV currently also includes a link to my repositories and a page briefly describing some projects that got anywhere. Far from all of my 100 or so personal free time projects get finished, but some do, and those are described and linked in my CV and on my website.
At least I do get interviews, which must mean at least something, and sometimes it's just the role that is not fitting. Often it is their tech stack and they do not believe in engineers learning things on the job, looking for a perfect match. Sometimes it was some test that they do, that presumes some knowledge about some library or that is some specific leetcode thingy, that I wouldn't code that way anyway, if I had the choice.