[geofft]

Stars don't represent anything real. You don't star a project when you clone it, when you grab a packaged version from a package repository or the home page, when you use it as a transitive dependency, when you scale it out successfully to thousands of machines, when you pay for a support contract, when you contribute a pull request, etc. In turn, when you do star a project, it doesn't require the project to even work, let alone do things well, respond to feedback or contributions, etc.

And startups have long asked for people to star their projects for visibility.

I don't know at what point it hasn't been "gamed." Maybe there are now bots starring repos, but is that meaningfully different than masses of very real humans being excited by hype?