Everyone’s definition of a successful project varies, but 5k GitHub stars (at time of writing before people started gaming the metric) qualifies to me.
Modesty aside, the general principle reminds me of Alex Graveley, the eng lead on GitHub Copilot, saying his compensation for creating Copilot was only a $20k bonus and a title bump.
They’re both good illustrations that “make something people want” is a necessary step to turning code into wealth, but not a sufficient step.