I'm not saying they're necessarily dishonest but it shows that the current ICO system is rather broken. Instead of slowly building up investments in rounds as your technology proves itself ICOs incentivize you to raise ridiculous amounts of money right at the start.
How popular? Who uses it?
Not saying everyone does this, but I doubt my behaviour is rare and I wouldn't read too much into github stars as they are too cheap to create. Look for actual use.
The most stared project I helped create has +5k stars from hitting the HN frontpage a few times, and there are very few actual users (by now probably none).
IPFS has compared to that much healthier growth, and for the number of stars they have a pretty decent userbase from what I can gather.
My biggest client at the minute is dtube.video but there are audio "clones" and document based clones in development that I'm aware of too.
Especially for a new a fairly new protocol, I'd say IPFS is popular.
Instead of proof of work mining that burns tons of electricity, storing and distributing files will become a new kind of useful mining.
That's a big deal.
There seems to be zero interest in creating something new and open like bitcoin but instead make as much money as possible.
Functionally it's basically BitTorrent with magnet links.
Also, it's not actually finished or production quality yet.