alt Hacker NewsEven before AI they hardly provided any value.
Are you going to click them one by one and figure out what they do? When you need a library/existing tool, do you use Google or come to such a project and do a search?
I am old enough to know Yahoo Directory, and "awesome" projects are exactly that.
You can't really do much other than bookmarking/"starring" and then completely forgetting about it.
Some do, they at least give an overview of a given ecosystem. Of course, like 90% I've seen are not exactly "curated", not for my definition of "curated". But it was a start. I still look for those lists when exploring a new (to me) system or a language, but I have extremely low expectations of them now.
They are better than AI-generated, superficial SEO listicles you usually get with search engines.
Do I come back to those lists? Not that I remember.