> Why would you touch the README file hundreds of times a year?

You're right, perhaps I should have said CHANGELOG etc.

Although some projects e.g. bump version numbers in README or add extra one-liner examples ....

Just look at the second file in the list then I guess.

This post is about exploring code, not documentation. Nobody is going to warn you about the README unless it is super outdated.

Some readme files include changelogs. But aside from that I think this can still net some useful information. I like to look at the most recently changed files in a repo as well.