Maybe it didn't land me a job on its own but it helped in the interview process. I wrote a limited Slay the Spire rules engine[0]. If I could do it again I wouldn't choose PHP, but my current job had an interview round where I walked the hiring manager through something I've written and it did a great job of showcasing a variety of things like writing testable code, separating concerns, making an extensible framework in which to easily implement new cards, etc.

In some ways the backend at my current job is slowly coming to resemble some of the patterns I used here, funnily enough.

[0]: https://github.com/dgunay/slay