I totally agree with you that the "ask about projects" question requires care. And, yes, I did see differing results depending on how the discussion went. When I did the question, I've run it as both a 1-minute quickie and a 15-minute conversation. I tried my best to dig an solid technical exposition out of the candidate if I could.
Typical cases where the project discussion was not helpful:
* Senior engineers could often talk in great detail about things they'd built, but then would most often bomb coding questions.
* A lot of MS/PhD-level new grads could give great talks (about almost anything) but again would bomb coding stuff.
* Lots of ESL candidates struggled tremendously to convey basic project details, but nevertheless were solid coders. From my TAing experience in grad school, I noticed that there are a lot of ESL CS students who have poor oral communication skills but are orders of magnitude stronger at written communication. (This made strong textbooks and written references crucial to the courses I TAed).
* Sadly we hired quiet a few senior / PhD-level people who could give great talks, were highly responsible, but were eventually fired for poor coding. (There were also some management disasters associated with those cases, but stronger coding skills would have helped them nevertheless).
Interviewing has both subjective and 'objective' parts. The most objective data one can collect are things like completion times, the actual code written, and (perhaps) raw contextual data like a measure of the candidate's mood (were they sweating like mad?). Project discussions rarely recover solid objective data. So, I'd definitely recommend against outsourcing those questions to a service like Triplebyte, and junior employees should probably also not be spending 15 mins on projects for /every/ candidate.