They were always junk, full of formulaic, self-promoting, astroturfing trash. In most cases, it would be more appropriate to view them as content marketing (c.f. digital pollution), not actual developer resources.
AI suffers the same problem Search Engines had: you cannot ask about something you dont know. Thats why monthly magazines were great: they pushed" knowledge to us so that we learned things we didnt know existed.
i added a PR once to add a package of mine which I thought was useful and he told me it didnt qualify as "awesome" lol. the reaction led me to dig around and I realized "oh, this is just content marketing"
Depending on what "generation of developers" you belong to, this could differ by decades :) Are you talking about LLMs probably? At that point, "awesome" lists were already mostly used for spam and marketing, none of the original "curated list" concept remained at this point.
I think I noticed awesome-lists changing from "Here is a curated list of AWESOME software" to "Here is a list of every software ever built, related in any way" somewhere around 2015 (thanks IM logs!), which must have been pretty shortly after the concept was introduced even, but can't remember when that was.