There is a weak correlation at best.

One of my open source projects has almost 5K stars on Github so I should be preaching with the choir here but that would be disingenuous.

I think that a lot of it comes down to having perfect timing... The kind of timing that only dumb luck can deliver.

Building a decent quality project is just the baseline requirement...

Saying that project quality or usefulness is the determining factor to achieving popularity in open source is like saying that having a pair of legs is the determining factor to being qualified for the 100m sprint in the olympics.

It's more that there a lot more factors than quality, like there being no competing projects or it being useful to a lot of people. Writing a quality project only gives it better odds than if the same thing was written shoddily.