But is a team usually aware that they are doing just pump and dump project or they just honestly do their job before a 3rd party perform pump and dump and make a coin worthless?
well, it's hard to tell.
Pump and dumps don't have to be orchestrated by the project team itself.
usually with good projects it's done by 3rd parties, like marketing firms who were paid in these coins, or exchanges.
For example, one project i'm following paid bitcoin.com exchange listing in their coin, and they dumped their bags few days ago and downed the price by 95%.