A big ICO team is a bad sign

A blockchain and a company are not the same thing.

A blockchain shouldn't need trust but a company absolutely does need it. Until the product is built you have no idea if they're even going to produce anything.

If they have a number of known entities in the space willing to peg their name to it, that's at least a modicum of trust that they aren't going to just take the money and run. It's not much, but it's something.

I'm sure you could cherry pick a few blockchain based startups with extremely small all engineer teams that you absolutely should not trust above some of these ones.

If team size is indicative of anything it's indicative of just how much money is being poured into anything blockchain based. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.

Lastly, the writer simply scanned the company's team page and decided "at least 4 of them look like they might be able to write code"? What exactly is that expertly produced opinion based on?

You mean like what happened with Ethereum Coin?