The reputation argument is so weird to me, it's free work for no compensation, to experiment and learn new things. That's personal development and going beyond doing the minimum (of not making an app at all), that's usually good reputation points.

Unless the code is in really bad shape, it's just unfinished which is very understandable given it's free software made in free time. One could make the argument they were likely properly prioritizing their day job as well.

I have my share of unfinished of abandoned projects and it never even once came up in an interview. And when I'm the interviewer, I'm more interested in why they started it, and what they learned from it, what they would have done differently, why did they want to use X and Y libraries for it and so on. I have much worse apps in the Play Store right now from places I worked at 10 years ago.

They deleted everything so I can't go check but there might be some cultural factors at play there to explain this.