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i don't see the contradiction. he's not asking for people to star his repo and it's not unreasonable to offer this advice if you perceive harmful cults of personality developing in a community. besides, lots of people just star things for lots of different reasons, bookmarking, giving props or ???.

"or ???", what does that mean?

I didn't point a contradiction, just noted that he has fans that idolize him. The contradiction is theirs.

Having an audience doesn't mean having a cult of personality.

I star githubs just in case I might want to read them later, with no comment implied about what I think of the author or even the content.

As he notes in the README, the old version was more interesting.[1] I suspect that most people starred the repo at that point.

[1]: https://github.com/jlongster/blog/tree/react-blog

His previous blog did react.js server side rendering. That's prolly it. Plus, may be it was an advice to his followers as well.