Whenever I come across a fork on GH, my first assumption is that the fork is aiming to be merged back into the main repo in the future, and my second assumption is that the maintainers of the fork have less of an interest in the project than the original project’s maintainers. It’s a signal of lower quality IMO. You should keep mention of the original project in your docs, but I personally don’t think it’s necessary to keep the repo as a fork.
You can use the GitHub virtual assistant to request this: https://support.github.com/request/fork
I am pretty sure that issues, PRs, stars, and everything should be preserved, but don’t take my word for it.