Sadly GitHub stars do have meaning to people who make decisions about which code library to add to their current project. And to people who review libraries tha

Sadly GitHub stars do have meaning to people who make decisions about which code library to add to their current project. And to people who review libraries that tackle a specific sort of problem, whose articles then get read by people who need to make decisions, etc. Such people may also use other metrics - recent activity, number of contributors, etc - to refine their judgments, but I've seen too many examples of "must have at least 1000 stars" used as the main justification for a decision. It's sad that the world is the way it is, but I doubt it will change anytime soon. If there's one change I'd like to make to GitHub, it would be to make the value of a starring decay over time. But I'm sure even that could be gamed.