I think your prior assumption that all OSS projects had a degree of quality is where your problem is. But I get it.

We’ve had low quality code for as long as we’ve had programmable machines. I’ve seen a lot of manually written bad code well before LLMs took over. Nowadays, I primarily look at how long a repo has been around and how active it is. A repo that has consistent activity is probably going to be a higher quality one. Even better if I can follow PRs to see how the code base is evolving.

I will admit it’s become more difficult to tell low quality git repos from higher quality ones. Missing files or incomplete README files are a thing of the past. Claude is very good at filling in the gaps to make all repos at least appear respectable.