What popular project are you referring to? Is it a project that has been listed on the stock exchange, or is it still in the development stage. Popular is not a guarantee of scam or trust, but popular brings one step more success than unpopular. For example, Terra is a popular project, but we can see what Terra has been up to so far. That is, popular is not a guarantee of a trust.
That's the difference between popular projects and top projects, even popular projects are not guaranteed to be trusted for the long term, the Luna crash condition is very worrying because people trust investment in popular projects and ignore trust in top coins like ETH and BNB.