Closing issues without addressing them does indeed present a problem for this approach. The guy behind lodash is especially aggressive about this which is why l

Closing issues without addressing them does indeed present a problem for this approach. The guy behind lodash is especially aggressive about this which is why lodash is the #1 repo on all of GitHub according to this metric (http://repoq.com/lodash/lodash/ http://repoq.com/lodash/lodash/). But I find that people closing issues without addressing them is actually a very rare thing. Far more common is for a project to be abandoned by the maintainer. And this heuristic is quite good at raising a red flag in that situation. Taking a deep dive into a library is of course the most reliable option. But in my experience, really getting an understanding of a large project is a multi-day or even multi-week affair, and this thing serves as an excellent first pass filter.