Stars are just someone's bookmark (me included) because there's no simple "bookmark this because I'll forget in an hour and want to look at it later when I have time." If one trusts Stars, you're literally trusting a bookmark that I didn't put more than 2 seconds of thought into clicking because I have a bad memory. Many I know do the same.

I go straight to code history, show me what the commits look like. One can derive a lot about the project based on just the way the commit messages are written before looking at the code being changed. How the code is changed over time (process, communication, methods, etc.) adds more layers to the qualitative observation. I move on to Issues when I want to see how the devs interact with the users having problems, which is another story.