China has a population of 1.3B. Isn't it possible that a lot of them have starred it because it is in Mandarin and targeted primarily towards them? You're not accounting for bias.
I think a high star/open-issue ratio is only a very weak indicator, that you should only use when you have hundreds of repos to evaluate and no domain expertise to decide which actually solves your problem.
But I find that people closing issues without addressing them is actually a very rare thing. Far more common is for a project to be abandoned by the maintainer. And this heuristic is quite good at raising a red flag in that situation.
Taking a deep dive into a library is of course the most reliable option. But in my experience, really getting an understanding of a large project is a multi-day or even multi-week affair, and this thing serves as an excellent first pass filter.