Is contributing to open source actually useful for getting hired, or is that just advice people repeat?

Keep seeing 'contribute to open source!' as the answer to everything — build your portfolio, get noticed, learn from real code. Honestly it's intimidating and I have no idea if a hiring manager will ever look at my three tiny doc-fix PRs.

For anyone who's actually landed a job or interview partly because of OSS work — was it the code itself, or the people you met doing it? Or did it just make you a better dev and hiring was a side effect? Trying to figure out if it's worth the time vs just building my own stuff.