What do you think about indie projects?

I think judging each game on its own merits is the answer.

The other answer is that $70 for any game is egregious, and so I'd much rather play an Indie than a AAA game from a cost perspective.

There are a lot of interesting, short indie projects I've enjoyed. And then some of the longer ones that are obviously a labor of love. Some I've played recently:
Press Any Button
Symphony of War: Nephilim Saga
The Pedestrian
Minit Fun Racer
Citizen Sleeper
Pan'orama
Foretales
Nuclear Blaze

There's a lot of good stuff being made, and a lot of variety.

Indie games are almost all I play tbh. I like that the creators can do basically whatever they want, without the need to satisfy some corporate overlords with 0 idea about the medium they're funding... They also tend to be cheaper and lighter on specs, which I and my 10 years old laptop definitely appreciate :'DD

Basically, I rarely play anything that's not indie (or at least AA). Clichéd AAA action games and endless souls-likes bore the hell out of me, and indie sector is where unique ideas and actually cool stories usually hide.

I prefer indie over AAA. I feel like I've played the same AAA action over and over again and while that's fun the variety of indie is more interesring to me.

Almost everything good about gaming comes from indie projects. People making games that are like art pieces are moving the industry forward. Whereas the AAA gaming studios are just there to generate profit-making machines.

Note that I exclude from the indie genre games made by asset flippers and other shit developers that are trying to push as much crap to market in order to make a tiny profit over a lot of volume. Those things don't really deserve to be called games.

With few exceptions, I rarely play any non-Indie games, and with the way the AAA(A) industry is headed (or rather, has been for years), this is not likely to change anytime soon. Besides the 60 70€/$/whatever price tag, microtransactions that could rival a freemium game despite being full price, and much of the money I'm paying ending up in the pockets of morally bankrupt CEOs while the actual programmers end up getting laid off... the actual gameplay in these games is often less appealing to me.

A big portion of the philosophy behind AAA games seems to be, "make it bigger, make it more, even at the cost of quality". Game descriptions boast about 30, 40, 60 hours of playtime, an even larger world to explore than in the previous installment, whatever many weapons, classes, enemies, characters... and often, it feels empty. Of the 40+ hours I play, 10 were actually fun; the large world feels empty, with the interesting points few and far between, and traveling from one to the next greatly contributed to the remaining 30 hours I could have done without; the content feels half-baked and could have benefited from cutting 90% of it and making the remaining 10% actually enjoyable...

Then indie games come along and say, here's a compact game world that's fun and interesting to explore, with a few well thought-out mechanics that suit the experience we provide, in a game that you can finish in ten to fifteen hours of which ten to fifteen hours are actually fun, and it cost you less than a third of what a AAA game would have.
There's no shortage of exceptions, of course, but for the most part, it's not even a contest in my eyes.

I love indie games, even tho I've been playing games since I was little it was the indie boom around 2010-ish that convinced me to stick to PC, and it was Humble Bundle what convinced me to start buying games instead of pirating them. That said I'm not gonna pretend like I exclusively play indie games because the reality is that I still play AAA games just as much, it's just that when it comes to "big" games I have a tendency to play older titles.
And I guess I should also mention that the fact that indie games are more likely to run in my potato of a laptop does mean that when I'm playing on that instead of the desktop PC pretty much all of my gaming diet is made up of indies.

Now, when it comes to why I like them, it's as simple as the fact that by virtue of they being smaller projects they tend to focus on one concrete idea rather that trying to do a bit of everything to attract a wider set of players. So IF you vibe with the idea behind the game's design there's a much bigger chance that you'll enjoy it since it really commits to what it's doing, rather than being afraid of alienating some players they focus on a niche and cater to said niche. Advantages of scale.
For example yesterday I started playing Submerged Hidden Depths, and while I think this is a relatively larger project than your classic one man team indie, I think it's unlikely (but not impossible) for a AAA studio to develop something like this game. The whole game is just about exploring, finding things, taking in the world, and watching the story unfold. There's no combat or even a fail state, the game exerts no resistance towards the player, offering a challenge is just not in its agenda and I really appreciate the sincerity to not include something that would mess with the experience they had in mind just for the sake of widening the game's appeal. Some might scoff at the prospect of a video game where all you need to do is figure out the right direction in order to progress (remember how some gamers got genuinely offended at the mere existence of walking sims a decade or so ago), but I can appreciate a game that just does its thing with confidence that it'll find its audience.
This is also a recommendation for the game although I'd suggest playing the first Submerged first since this is a direct sequel that evidently expects the player to already be familiar with the plot of its predecessor.

I play mostly indie games (and I really enjoy them), also because my comp isn't very powerful. :)
Indie games might be much better than the mainstream games but also might be very bad.

I've played very few AAA games, honestly, mostly because of high costs more than how enjoyable they are (and PC specs), the other part is because I feel like indie games have a lot of really good gems that scratch an itch AAA could never. Don't dislike AAA, not a huge fan either.