> It's a heuristic that saves me time.
A bad one.
I listed many other useful heuristics. Do you not find value in them? Do you find stars more valuable than them?
Take a moment to consider stars as a useful metric may only be useful for packages created prior to ~2015 when they weren't such a strong vanity metric, and are already very well established. This is preconditioning you to think "stars can still sometimes be useful, because I took a look at Facebook's React GH and it has a quarter million stars".
Sure, it's useful for that. But you aren't going to evaluate if the "React" package is safe. You already trivially know it is.
You'll be evaluating packages like "left-pad". Or any number of packages involved in the latest round of supply chain attacks.
For that matter, VCs are the ones stars are being targeted at, and potential employers (something this article doesn't cover, but some potential hires do hope to leverage on their resume).
If you are a VC, or an employer, it is a negative metric. If you are a dev evaluating packages, it is a vacuous metric that either tells you what you already know, or would be better answered looking at literally anything else within that repo.
The article also called out how download count can be faked trivially. I admit I have relied upon this in the past by mistake. Release frequency I do use as one metric.
When I care about making decisions for a system that will ingest 50k-250k TPS or need to respond in sub-second timings (systems I have worked on multiple times), you can bet "looking at stars" is a useless metric.
For personal projects, it is equally useless.
I care about how many tutorials are online. And today, I care more about if there was enough textual artifacts for the LLMs to usefully build it into their memory and to search on. I care if their docs are good so I spend less tokens burning through their codebase for APIs. I care if they resolve issues in a timely manner. I care if they have meaningful releases and not just garbage nothings every week.
I didn't mean for this to sound like a rant. But seriously, I just can't imagine in any scenario where "I look at stars" as a useful metric. You want to add it to the list? Sure. That is fine. But it should not be a deciding factor. I have chosen libraries with less stars because it had better metrics on things I cared about, and it was the correct choice (I ended up needing to evaluate them both anyhow. But I had my preference from the start).
Choosing the wrong package will waste you so much more time. Spend the 5 minutes evaluating for stuff that is important to your project.