I don't really pay attention to stars. Do people use them as bookmarks? Why would you star a repo if you knew so little about it?

Stars for me are basically "this might be interesting but I don't have time to look at it now, hopefully I'll think about it later and give it a second look".

I exclusively use stars as bookmarks which is why I always found it strange when people talked about lots of stars meaning high quality or trustworthy…I’ve learned since then that I’m probably in the minority (both in using stars as bookmarks and not caring about how many stars a repo has).

Judging by how many people apparently are paying bots to give their lazily vibe-coded repos thousands of stars, it seems like people both simultaneously take stars seriously while not taking them seriously at all. It breaks my brain.