This is concerning, now it's going to be even harder to tell if a repo is astroturfed by marketers or is really receiving organic adoption.
> access to this data is being limited to a repository's own admins and collaborators.
Sounds fine to me? Why would a random third-party need to know which repos do I star, and who stars my repos?
Because astroturfing and fake stars for projects are absolutely rampant right now. Hiding the stats makes it impossible to look at heuristics and essentially makes it even more useless as a metric of anything.
stars have never been a good metric, I use them as bookmarks, not a show of support or that I use a project, more often than not they have a feature or two that I'm curious about for my own projects
Why would GitHub want to restrict this?
because people scrape the star lists to find accounts to send emails to, they had a blog post on it last week