Were they ever awesome? By design, they attract projects looking for visibility etc.
Most of those so-called awesome lists have zero to very little no human judgement when new projects are included. One example I found in the wild is [0], which has ca. 50 awesome projects already while libghostty isn't even stable. I doubt that even 10% of those projects are anywhere good, let alone _awesome_.
I, for one, would like to have an opposite — awful-<something>. Just so we know which things we should avoid. With AI, it's getting even more important to know what to use.