Bad faith comment I assume. The most popular repo is some kind of guide. The other top ones are repos for sites like login.gov and government analytics
For clarity though, I would think software engineers would prefer to engineer their software with software, and not a bunch of disparate rules of varying quality communicated to people passively.
Despite the slightly pessimistic view I expressed about the general character of the most starred 18F repos which I also distinctly admitted was probably a myopic view in light of their breadth.