[sph]

For me the presence of a stale bot that automatically closes issues after 30 days - like Bulma - is a major red flag.

Sweeping issues under the carpet actively makes your library worse, only because one really values the vanity metric of "closed/open issue ratio".

Github star count is another useless metric, often inflated by "star this on github" widgets on the homepage.

[Uehreka]

I wish the auto-close bot could be considered a red flag for the exact reasons you stated, but unfortunately it’s in effect on tons of actually good projects, so it’s not useful as a signal.