whats your actual chcklist before getting a backlink from website?

Check if the site is topically relevant gets organic traffic ranks for keywords in your niche, has clean outbound links & is not part of a spammy link network

My Checklist is pretty simple: topical relevance, Real organic traffic, Quality of recent content, and whether the site has an actual audience, I'd take a relevant site with steady traffic over a high DA site built just for selling link's.