Same experience for me, when interviewing if the candidate is a new grad and has a nice GitHub profile and I can actually look at the code it's great (otherwise what I am hiring on?), but I never passed anyone for not having GitHub contributions.

Likewise, unless I just stop doing my job and flat out refuse to do my tasks I never had issues with learning new technologies on the job. If anything I got congratulated for showing initiative in exploring ways to better our current stack.