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I wonder how much of their recent downtime can be attributed to the scrapers and other "automated" traffic they'd be getting these days

This data was available via API endpoints, not something that needed scraping.

Stars were abused for spam, that's why it has been made private for the project owner eyes only.

You can make a GitHub app and access a user's stars with their permission. It's not gatekeeping, you have to do more to be secure about it though.