Totally agree with you. I think Github "stars" are a relic of the past. They should be renamed to "Bookmarks" and exist as a tool for users to just mark interesting repositories. By no means should a repository keep a count of how many people bookmarked it. It makes no practical sense. Active maintainers and commit dates are much better metric.

> Active maintainers and commit dates are much better metric.

But in an age of bots/agents, that's just kicking the can down the road by making it easier to fudge regular activity of practically zero importance. Even worse for the ecosystem than paid like counts.