My checklist would be (I'm eager to know other people correct me) suitable (does it some my needs) , stable, available (including documentation, live q&a resources like stackoverflow, blog posts explaining how- not new ones but existing and up to date regarding the version available), and simple.
I try to adapt my checklist to the problem at hand. Sometimes I'm making something as a hobby project, or to solve a problem right now. Sometimes I want to write code that will outlive me, and sometimes I'll just throw some code at the wall and call it done.
Each situation necessarily results in different priorities and tools. I wouldn't TDD a gamejam project, and I wouldn't start a multi-year project in zig - at least, not yet.
For infrastructure projects I want well written deps which are simple, easy to use and have good documentation. When I'm evaluating something I often read bits of its source code (eg to figure out how to do something not listed in the examples). You get a sense of where to put things that way - actix (the actor library, not the web library) is very carefully designed, but seems to go a bit overboard inventing new concepts (+ associated traits). Tide feels pragmatic - its a bit sloppy with allocations, but it doesn't seem to really care. It wants to be fast enough and good enough while being simple to use.
For hobby projects I like to follow my nose and pick whatever seems shiny. Over the last few years I've learned svelte, typescript, snowpack, rust (and some rust libraries), zig, wasm and other stuff. I like to make some risky bets and then just play the hand out and see what happens. And I use that as fuel for when I make longer term projects. I'm making a little database at the moment and I'm using rust - which is much slower for me to write (compared to nodejs) but it matches the values of the project I'm working on to a tee.
