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.
The popularity of a project has nothing to do with how good it can possibly be, and I think we have too many examples of this, meme coins, metaverse coins and shitcoins are clear examples of coins which are incredibly popular coins among the community and despite that popularity the number of those coins which disappear each month is huge, so people need to learn to look beyond the popularity of a project if they do not want to lose their limited capital.