This is a brutal mistake.
"Stars and watchers for this repository will be permanently erased, which will affect repository rankings."
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...
"Stars and watchers for this repository will be permanently erased, which will affect repository rankings."
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...
[I work for Elastic]
I'm the maintainer of a reasonably popular project (~9K stars) and it's certainly a nightmare scenario given that I consider the stars to give it credibility in a crowded space.
I guess ES has enough brand recognition. But it'd be killer for a lesser known project. While stars don't matter per se, they do give a project some credibility over a project with 0 stars or 50 stars.
If someone looked at both Elasticsearch and Opensearch and was new to the area, they'd think Opensearch was the original and ES the fork.
It also seems to factor into github search, OpenSearch is on the first page and ElasticSearch is nowhere to be found.
https://github.com/search?q=search&type=repositories
When I see that a project as been forked I use these stats to help select which fork to go with.