As I mentioned, this is playing into the fallacy that telling a story during the interview is equivalent to the communication skills required for performing the job.
It confuses story-telling performance during an interview, and the stresses of a success/fail situation, with the type required to perform real work.
Mistaking "overlap" for all-encompassing. Sure, there's overlap. There's overlap in being able to type up a coherent response to a post on Hacker News, but it doesn't make me more qualified for your position.
It fails because it assumes that the candidate has a single defined favorite project. If you try to make the question more broad, then it becomes so open-ended that it is hard to equally compare candidates on it. It becomes random chance that a candidate discusses a project in a way conducive to doing the job. Where if more precise or structured, it might weed out people who can talk passionately about a personal project from those who can constructively explain to a manager the challenges of a project.
It also starts stretching it into saying that everything is story-telling so as to make the term meaningless. I agree it is to some degree, but it's important to try to stick with meaningful mental models that can make predictive assessments about candidates.
The huge problem is there are people without the skills who can tell a good story. This process let's these people through, while ignoring good candidates who may not perform well on this interview question.
