Although commits can be gamed on GitHub, stars are significantly harder to game as they require human accounts to be doing so.
You could game a few stars with sockpuppet accounts, but it's infeasible to game 100+ stars.
I would not be surprised if you can buy quite a lot of them for cheap.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140
> This package costed me 8.19 Euros for 100 stars which is €0.08/star.
Shoot for the stars, I guess.
> You could game a few stars with sockpuppet accounts, but it's infeasible to game 100+ stars.
It’s not only feasible, it’s trivial.
https://the-guild.dev/blog/judging-open-source-by-github-sta...