What a star count actually tells you

A star is one click from one person who may never have run the software. It measures attention at a moment in time, and attention is distributed by whatever was on the front page of an aggregator that week. A project with two hundred thousand stars and a project with two thousand can be equally safe to depend on, or equally unsafe.

The figures worth reading are the ones that describe activity rather than popularity. When was the last commit, and was it a dependency bump or a fix. How long has the repository existed, because surviving three years is a stronger signal than arriving loudly. How many people have commit rights, because a single maintainer is a single point of failure regardless of how many stars they have.

Licence matters more than any of it. A project under a licence you cannot comply with is not a candidate, however good it is. This is why every listing here shows the licence next to the star count rather than buried further down, and why Unknown is displayed rather than quietly omitted.

None of this means star counts are useless. A project gaining stars quickly is usually getting more contributors and more scrutiny at the same time. Read it as a leading indicator of attention, and then go and check the things that actually decide whether the software will still be there in two years.