Some people are not natural story tellers. Telling a story is not a usual part of the job responsibility of a software engineer—we aren't novelists. Having a memorable debugging experience doesn't directly equate to having a good story to tell.
This is really the same issue with the promo culture we see at Big Tech companies: you end up promoting the people who are good at crafting promo packets i.e. telling stories about their work. There is certainly a good overlap between that and the people who do genuinely good work, but it's not a perfect overlap.
Personally I don't really mind it because I consider myself good at story telling. But as an interviewer I would never do that to a candidate because not everyone can tell good stories.