white paper is very important for you to read it before taking the Bounty or Investment Campaign in the ICO Project. Because by paying attention to the white paper already in the project, we can know whether the Project is Scam or not. That is one of the basic benefits of the current white paper.
all whitepapers don't really matter to me, because they can take a few parts from other project whitepapers and then edit them, if you read them carefully, there's no whitepaper that's completely unattractive, everything is complete and looks convincing.
But you are right, at least a good project must have it and I care more about communicating directly with developers on official telegrams or their social media, I often ask critical questions to assess whether they are sure or not with their own projects.