The only providers I have ever used in production, or would likely ever consider using would be published by Hashicorp or the software vendor for the resource being managed (for example [1]). Much would need to be done to trust any other third party without good reason.

I have had similar experiences poking around other tf providers which were of apparently low quality.

[1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/elastic/ec/latest/do...

That's really not the case. Most of the provider I use are third-party - Datadog, Cloudflare, GitHub, PostreSQL, RabbitMQ, MySQL, and tons more. Regarding the module - you should choose them the way use you any other third-party library. I use reputable modules for many things that save me tons of work.