Overly verbose and "glitter" readme.md files is a good indicator of bad projects or at least projects which need more attention to be used. It's too often pre-rugpull or look-at-me repos where better solutions are one click away.

Finding any curse words in hidden comments in the commit history is for me a good indication of a human working on a passion project, though ymmv.

And there are always exceptions to the exception of the exceptions.