Not sure if it is an instance of Goodhart's law or just increased exposure to non-developers crowds, but Github stars used to be a good indicator of the popularity AND adoption of an open source project.
Nowadays, a demo project gets 89k stars in few days... https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT
What do you think?
Meaning, the area is skewed towards popularity/interest, and for that, GitHub Stars remain a good-enough indicator, just as upvotes on GH issues, and posts on certain sites are.