I think an important distinction is that most of the awesome lists required an entry to have some sort of a sentence-long pitch about why something's awesome instead of a giant list of items with no way to distinguish between them without clicking. That's far more important than tags in my opinion.

That said, I am biased as I maintained quite a few of them years ago and am happy to see today's youngling maintain this tradition of low-effort contributions to make a source that's better than a search engine when looking for stuff in a specific niche.