It's not exactly as bad as it sounds, there's been a few times I have merged a PR from someone where I reviewed it, I just never went through the "Review this PR" -> "Approve PR" workflow that adds the meta data "joshmanders has approved this PR"
I don't know how it could serve as any meaningful flag. It's normal to merge to main without any review in your own solo hobby projects, and I kind of doubt this badge goes so far as to exclude those kinds of repos.
I almost never "review" PRs people send on my repos through the GitHub UI. I "review" them in the sense that I look at them, and comment when needed of course.
This "achievement" is not indicative of anything at all.
Depends on the criteria. Do automated reviews count?
I set up build+test via GH actions and have GitHub run them on PR's. And make all changes through PR's.
This not only prevents "forgot to run tests" type accidents during regular development, it also helps me when I come back to a hobby project months later, and it lets me confidently do small changes (think version bumps) directly through GitHub's editor, which saves a bunch of time.
And when, against the odds, I actually do get a contribution, the infra is already there and it really cuts down my turnaround time to get it merged, bump the version and deploy the release.
Of course if a single direct push yields you the badge then I guess pretty much every solo dev gets it sooner or later. But that indirectly turns it back into a good badge, right? "Independent enough to have a life outside a standardized corporate process"?
Actions can still provide the feedback even without a PR if you trigger on push, you just don't have a gate like PR for contribution. I do similar to what you're describing and would recommend a feedback loop for build/test 100% of the time.
I just don't think merging without review equates is an absolute negative depending on the situation, in this case no reviewers exist outside of myself and from my perspective this is how a lot projects start, someone just goes for it and starts committing! Yolo...