In fact the initial negative campaigns initiated by the creators of Zig and Odin against V (and then turned on other languages like C3[4] and Zen C[5]), appeared to have been based on jealousy over supporter donations and GitHub stars.
Zig, has among the weirdest GitHub star history of any language repo seen. Stalled or lower GitHub popularity, then sudden explosion in stars after the release of numerous AI ebooks on Amazon (mid to late 2024). The release of the mostly AI ebooks, were very oddly close together, as if by contract or bounty. Just a strange timeline. Even when Zig moved to Codeberg and their GitHub repo was "frozen", was getting hundreds of stars per month (despite over 3,000 open issues) for a long time, which made no sense.
On the other hand, the vlang repo has always been rated in or near the top 10 of language repos[3] (per year), based on stars, since close to its beginning (from 2019).
Lastly, stars on GitHub are often checked and purged. It's not like Github personnel don't look. A major indicator of fake stars, is that the repo does not have matching activity, contributors, or forks. For instance, like V (when it came into existence), Zen C (4K stars since 2025) had a sudden burst in stars. Allowing it to nearly catch a long time repo like C3 (5K stars since 2019). Does V or Zen C, by gaining stars quickly or having more stars (than a 2019 competitor) mean they are fake?
It's the other indicators that are important too, not just star counts or fan jealousy over other repos having higher star counts.
[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig
[2]: https://ossinsight.io/collections/programming-language
[3]: https://ossinsight.io/collections/programming-language/trend...