People have started to value things like GitHub forks and stars as though they mean something. Create a metric and it will get abused, this is how the world works.
Stars usually mean your project is useful to someone, so they are indeed nice to see. They're also an endorsement of people who use a project and are apparently happy, so the project is more likely to do what it says and do it well.
These metrics aren't usually a problem until people attempt to game the system like it's done on platforms like youtube, but I'm not aware of this happening on github (at least not often).
People have started to value things like GitHub forks and stars as though they mean something. Create a metric and it will get abused, this is how the world works.