I think it comes down to "Is the juice worth the squeeze"

As someone who worked for a large organization maintaining an OSS project, one issue I faced was how do you show impact? We used to have many organizations really love and use our project , but they would hardly give anything back to the project, including writing blogs where they could have shared some success stories. IMO github stars/pip downloads etc are not good metrics and these are even worser metrics in today's agentic AI world. Its so easy to fake these nowdays.

Github stars are such a terrible metric, completely gameable. The facy it is taken seriously appalls me.

People can't go into OSS projects expecting anyone will care as much as they do. In general, only a few applications become popular enough to remain in active self-sustaining maintenance a decade later.

The real question, is if a project is "worth it" for your own fun. =3