It is indeed necessary. The team behind the project plays a great role in the project's success. One thing you should also consider is making sure the project can show a minimum viable product. You should check out NeuronChain. We're one of the few projects who developed our product first instead of just making a promise with just a whitepaper. Visit our website here:
https://neuronchain.io/There are many projects that started with nothing so that should not be something necessary to determine if you are going to invest in a project or not, what you should do is to try to verify the identity of those behind the project and see if they are real.