So unless you are really well versed in the project and spent some time following it, stars actually might be a better indicator of the project quality and reputation.
God, I hate this. Every time I have an issue with something, look it up on the issue tracker and find the exact issue I'm having autoclosed as "stale" by a fucking bot because the author didn't reply "this is still an issue" once every 24 hours, it instantly makes my blood boil and I avoid using the software in question as much as possible in the future. Nothing screams "I care more about github numbers than my users or the quality of my software" more than this.
The problem here is simply closing issues that are not fixed because they're "stale", no reason to do this unless you're obsessed with keeping the number of open issues low to deceive people into believing no issues exist. Keeping issues open does not take any effort.