[ayarseus]

I wonder how much of their recent downtime can be attributed to the scrapers and other "automated" traffic they'd be getting these days

[punkpeye]

This data was available via API endpoints, not something that needed scraping.

[verdverm]

Stars were abused for spam, that's why it has been made private for the project owner eyes only.

You can make a GitHub app and access a user's stars with their permission. It's not gatekeeping, you have to do more to be secure about it though.