It never was a good indication of something. A whitepaper is good to formalize an idea, but without much work put into that, it is meaningless. It is even hard to rationalize the value and potential of the project merely by a website and whitepaper. That makes the problem should not have relied on the whitepaper alone, but instead, the assumption that both of these two are good enough characteristics of a good project. It is ridiculous and does not even make sense.