Even back then in 2017-2018 when the altcoin market have limited cases scams and fake projects, there were issues of whitepaper plagiarism and a host of many other cases of abuse of the content and intent of whitepaper in the first.
Much more now that there are tons of hype development and projects that have opened up the can of worms that have defeated total the essence of whitepaper to a project and investors alike, many of the meme coins don't even have a whitepaper, what their call whitepaper is a mere statement and articles so none should take them seriously.
Be very careful before you put your money down for such projects.
Do you remember that those years contained a limited number of fraudulent projects? Did we live in different worlds? I remember very well that only here, on the forum, every day we found dozens of scam projects and most of them were based on fake technical documents. Sites were written on the knee, heaps of shitcoins were created, and accordingly, the number of scams grew exponentially.
I cannot say that today's time has changed anything. There are only a few alternative coins that are worthy of attention, and these are, oddly enough, not new projects; everything else, sooner or later, turns into dust.