I've been hearing these kinds of things since 2014 (when I wrote a long post about the work sample process we had used at Matasano). I've been hiring continuously since 2008, so 18 years, and in that entire time I have never come close to hiring a scammer.
It might be a more salient concern now, in the era of AI agents, and we are much warier today than I was at Matasano, but generally I think this risk is more talked about than experienced.