Presentation matters. Good documentation is evidence of a library that has been carefully thought through. Slop in the readme suggests slop in the code.

I've seen developers who genuinely like to write code, but never met one who likes to write documents. I know they exist somewhere, but I'd not judge someone's programming ability/willingness by their English writing ability/willingness.

I could vibe code the hell out of something but write a good README for it by hand, doesn't mean that something is actually good. But yes, A -> B != B -> A, as your last sentence says.

From my point of view, if I wanted an AI summary of a project I could generate one myself. An unlabeled AI readme is almost worse than nothing! I've generated AI readmes myself- they can be useful- but they aren't something to show off.

I'll read a badly-formatted readme written by a human with far more interest than a formulaic LLM summary of a project. But it seems like nobody even notices a readme is slop because it has nice Markdown, and my best guess as to why is that people have become habituated to this stuff.