We literally never hire someone without a technical interview, but we do look at github/bitbucket/gitlab/whatever code we can find the day or so before the interview. If there's something interesting we'll ask questions about it during the interview.
So far, there hasn't been one candidate that had anything resembling a portfolio online, but we don't hire all that often and i've only been doing it for a bit over a year.
It shows something slightly different than a github profile since it doesn't typically show full projects but both can show off competence pretty well IMO.
Someone with a well written technical blog or good github portfolio is definitely going to have an advantage in any hiring I do.
So far, there hasn't been one candidate that had anything resembling a portfolio online, but we don't hire all that often and i've only been doing it for a bit over a year.