some time ago i would have read the whitepapers and cared about what they have written in it but last year when i started seeing these developers looking for "paper writers" i realized most of them don't even write their own whitepaper for their own project!!!
they pay someone else to write it for them and make it look good. most of them include hyped up subjects like "scaling" in their paper to just get a better pump.
One of the main reason why a certain project fails. I also noticed that in every ICO projects today, but not all, there are also quite a good team who built everything with their own including writing their own whitepaper.
Some investors nowadays didnt even care to read the white paper, instead they follow the project in social media and telegram and read the interactions between the team/dev and investors. It would be better that way so you could raise questions outright.