Word of mouth: What if it's just some random script a guy created in a weekend? I have my code used by others in such a manner.

Package managers: Same problem as above. You missed the point of free software.

Search engines: They do a disastrous job of indexing anything on a forge. You might as well yell at the clouds instead.

LLM of choice: I'm not taking this seriously.

> Does anyone seriously use GitHub search to discover new projects?

I don't even understand the point of such questions. None of the solutions you proposed are any better solving what I described than the insufficient method I wrote about.