I don't think it matters all that much. It's like buying followers on social media: sure, with higher metrics more people may give you the benefit of the doubt

I don't think it matters all that much. It's like buying followers on social media: sure, with higher metrics more people may give you the benefit of the doubt when they first discover you. But at the end of the day, you need actual traction if you want to make an impact. I can't think of a time in the last few years where it was so hard to figure out what libraries people were using to solve some problem that my only hope was to open up the top few NPM search results and sort by stars. A bad library with a lot of stars and no users is still a library nobody talks about nor uses.