alt Hacker NewsStars, issues closed, PRs, commits, all are pointless metrics.
The metrics you want are mostly ones they don't and can't have. Number of dependent projects for instance.
The metrics they keep are just what people have said, a way to gameify and keep people interested.
So number of daily/weekly downloads on PyPI/npm/etc?
All these things are a proxy for popularity and that is a valuable metric. I have seen projects with amazing code quality but if they are not maintained eventually they stop working due to updates to dependencies, external APIs, runtime environment, etc. And I have see projects with meh code quality but so popular that every quirk and weird issue had a known workaround. Take ffmpeg for example: its code is.. arcane. But would you choose a random video transcoder written in JavaScript just due to the beautiful code that was last updated in 2012?