That's a difficult thing to make since you have to be subjective when suggesting a resource.
For example, in awesome-scifi's novels section[0], we as the maintainers try to tackle this project by requesting from the PR submitter to add a subjective description on why the submitter thinks that the novel in question is awesome (backed up by the name of the submitter so you know exactly who wrote that description), to add a Goodreads rating at the time of submitting a PR, and an emoji if it contains more than 100k ratings on Goodreads (indicating that it's a popular one).
Now, I'm obviously being subjective when talking about a list I'm one of the maintainers of, but when I'm searching for a book, I get to see if it has a good rating, if it got a lot of ratings, and a subjective description of why the person who submitted it thinks it's awesome. It works rather well in my case.
Is that going to be true for all people around the world, regardless of income? Sure it's probably true for you or I, but free learning resources are likely to be vital for many others.
Programming is a lot of material, but it’s repetitive enough that you have near infinite opportunities to practice it. You don’t need to cram, you just need to practice. For the things that aren’t repetitive but may still come up, there is Google and ctrl-f in your pdf reader of choice.
And I disagree with you about dubious value being a concern. If you’re going to bother using the book, you can bother Googling it to see if it is valuable.
One, they present too many choices of dubious value. The most important part of book recommendations is a vetting of a few resources that are guaranteed to be enlightening.
Two, the monetary cost of a book isn't the largest "cost". The largest cost is the time spent reading the book, which again means that the most value that can be added is through the vetting of the contents of the book compared to all other alternatives.