This thread shows signs of having been upvoted and commented on by booster accounts. That's against the rules and we ban accounts and sites that do that, so please don't do that!
Ideally voting ring noise can be detected and filtered out, but it's probably not worth anyone's time building that sort of system unless HN had a real problem with it. And this is the first time I've seen a @dang post on it in quite some time.
Or maybe they already have it but a voting ring still gives enough juice to be useful.
If I had a voting ring or set of HN bots, why would I use them to upvote something so benign as an open source date library on github?
Open source projects are in a competitive environment and benefit from marketing tactics just like anything else.
And a project that people use certainly confers value on its creator, even if it's just a smile on their face. But it can be leveraged for other benefits like clout in the ecosystem.
As an extreme example of what you can do with a popular open source project, consider https://www.patreon.com/evanyou.