Stars are important but not the only metric I rely upon.

Time of latest commit, number of open issues, forks, and pull requests, and number of contributors are important as well. The level of documentation is also important.

I use a lot of open source packages because often times I don’t want to spend a few hours rebuilding the wheel, like building a client library for something. If I find some that meets my criteria, I can be solving actual problems sooner.

When something doesn’t exist or is supported, it’s important to contribute either by raising an issue or filing a PR.