Yeah well it's like money these days; having a $10 million net worth doesn't actually say much about a person; maybe it fell on their lap because they knew the right people or maybe they had to struggle to earn every cent. It's the same with GitHub stars.
Unfortunately, those who had it easy tend to get much more attention and are much more visible; attention is how they got there in the first place so of course there is not much merit behind their work. A lot of software tooling is a Potemkin village. It's over-hyped and developers/users are forced into it by their boss who happens to be an investor in the project founder's company.
It often seems like nobody from Millennial or Gen Z generations built any good popular software tool or library... It's like nothing innovative came out since the time of Linux, GNU and GIT... No competent software developers since John Carmack? It's not true of course, it's just that we are a heavily suppressed and manipulated generation. Firstly, we are demoralized, so there are less of us actually putting in the effort to build quality stuff, but even those who do, our work is often marginalized and covered up by algorithms. Often nipped in the bud.
We have to consider that Linus Torvalds didn't build Linux all by himself. Had the community not come together and made all these distros, today, nobody would even know what Linux is and Linus Torvalds would be a failed developer living in the shadow of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.