I also never in my career have consciously looked at the GH star counter on a repo, let alone used it to make decisions.

Instead I look at (in addition to the above):

1. Who is the author? Is it just some person chasing Internet clout by making tons of 'cool' libraries across different domains? Or are they someone senior working in an industry sector from which project might actually benefit in expertise?

2. Is the author working alone? Are there regular contributors? Is there an established governance structure? Is the project going to survive one person getting bored / burning out / signing an NDA / dying?

3. Is the project style over substance? Did it introduce logos, discord channels, mascots too early? Is it trying too hard to become The New Hot Thing?

4. What are the project's dependencies? Is its dependency set conservative or is it going to cause supply chain problems down the line?

5. What's the project's development cadence? Is it shipping features and breaking APIs too fast? Has it ever done a patch release or backported fixes, or does it always live at the bleeding edge?

6. NEW ARRIVAL 2026! Is the project actually carefully crafted and well designed, or is it just LLM slop? Am I about to discover that even though it's a bunch of code it doesn't actually work?

7. If the project is security critical (handles auth, public facing protocol parsing, etc.): do a deeper dive into the code.